How to Create Your Author Brand

A decade ago, there were very few people concerned with their personal brands apart from, well, brands. But with the proliferation of social media and the increased and privileged access everyone has to one another now through the internet, the creation of a personal brand has become crucial across many different industries. Once you make the decision to write a book and add “published author” to your resume, you must create an author brand before your book comes out. Almost like a form of pre-marketing, your author brand should clearly demonstrate to potential readers who you are, what to expect from your book, and why they should want to get this information from you in particular. Here’s how to build your brand in a way that will send pre-sale numbers climbing and land your book on bestseller lists. 

Step 1: Define Your Message and Expertise

If you’ve already decided to write, have begun to write, or have already written your book, this step is likely already completed. The very first thing you need to do is define the message of your book, or the problem that readers are going to come to you for help solving. Take for example Chad Rubin’s book Cheaper, Easier, Direct. The problem Rubin is solving in his book is how to succeed in selling products directly to consumers over the internet. As you can see, this message is specific and broad at the same time, which is the ideal you want to aim for. Specific enough that there aren’t too many people who are trying to answer the same question or too many books addressing it and broad enough that it is appealing to many different people with different types of businesses at different stages in their career. 

At the same time as you define your message, you also want to define your expertise. In other words, what makes you the person that people should trust to provide the solution they are searching for? If you are an entrepreneur or venture capitalist with years of experience and success under your belt, you likely already have all the evidence you need to provide for readers. You just have to make sure it’s clear and accessible, in places like the About page on your website and your author bio. Potential readers should come away from these places knowing exactly who you are and why they should trust you and your book to help them. Take Rubin’s as an example:

Chad Rubin builds E-commerce businesses. Fresh out of college and Wall Street, he took his family vacuum business online and built his own direct to consumer E-commerce business called Crucial Vacuum. He grew it from 0 a $20 million dollar valuation in just 7 years. He happens to be a top 250 Amazon seller. He co-founded Skubana with DJ Kunovac and built one of e-commerce’s hottest operational softwares. Skubana is the only software that you’ll ever need to manage and accelerate the growth of your e-commerce business. It is beautiful, intelligent, and highly intuitive and incorporates every feature imaginable to drive your future success.

This bio clearly defines his expertise and why you should trust the advice in his book. 

Step 2: Identify Your Target Audience

Once you’ve defined your message and established yourself as an expert qualified to offer said information, the next step is identifying your target audience. Who are the people who are going to run into the problem whose solution you have discovered and written a book about? If you are writing a book as a way to grow your business or expand the opportunities available to you, some of this audience is likely going to be existing and prospective customers or clients. For people who know you and already work with you, your book can serve as an additional tool to help them on their own personal or business journey. For people who know of you but are not clients yet, your book can serve as an introduction to you and your work.

But there is also a whole swath of other potential readers for you to discover—and to reach that broad audience you actually need to get even more specific. People are not going to stop to check out your book in physical and online bookstores if the promises and information are vague and laden with platitudes. They are going to stop if your message is clear, unique, specific, and delivered so confidently that they become convinced of its importance to them achieving success on their personal journey—and your message is only going to come across that way and connect with people if you have a clearly defined brand. 

Step 3: Curate Your Image

Every element of your author brand must be curated to support your central message. This includes visual representations and images of you that exist on the internet, such as your author photo, professional headshot, and the photos you put up on social media. If you’re trying to position yourself as an expert in finance or technology, your author photo shouldn’t be a moody, sepia glamour shot or a picture of you at the beach with your kids. Sometimes images can telegraph more than words can say—every possible inference or assumption a prospective reader might make in response to seeing a picture of you should support your goal and your brand. 

Step 4: Utilize Your Owned Media Channels

This is the step where your pre-marketing efforts kick into high gear. Now that you’ve created your message, established yourself as an expert and curated your image to match, you can begin spreading the word among your followers, customers, clients, and network about your book. If you already have an established network, you likely have many of these communication methods already in place. If you have a mailing list or newsletter you can start mentioning your book regularly, create a contest to win a free copy or even include an excerpt that will draw subscribers in and make them want to read more. You can post on your social media about the book, do a cover reveal on Instagram or a Q&A on Facebook or Instagram Live. On your blog, you can publish excerpts, offer some behind-the-scenes content about the book writing process, or write about tangential topics that will drum up interest in the information in the book. You can also contribute the latter to public-facing sites like Medium or author guest posts for websites or publications that report on the industry or topic covered in your book. Through your website, you can advertise an online course or seminar built around the information in your book to run alongside or after your book’s publication. 

Taking advantage of these owned media channels where you have total control over the message is the perfect way to stoke excitement and anticipation about your book. Plus, once it comes out, you will have all of this content that already exists around it and in support of it, further driving home your expertise and qualifications as an author. 

Step 5: Prepare to Be Discovered

Many of the actions you take on your owned media channels will also serve to stoke interest in prospective readers who discover you organically—you want to be sure that when they do come across your website or the presale page for your book that they immediately know and understand your author brand. The content of a book is typically one of the last things people consider before deciding whether or not to purchase and read it. All the information they take in and judge before that, including the title, cover, description, author bio, and author photo, need to clearly communicate your brand to encourage them to click “buy now.” 

Indeed, everything you’ve done in steps one through four, while all critically important and beneficial on their own, come together to guarantee that newcomers to your site and bookstore browsers, in addition to people already in your orbit, will want to buy your book. Putting in the time to create a comprehensive, clear, and compelling author brand prepares you for these make-or-break moments when readers can choose to buy your book or somebody else’s and primes them to choose yours.