Episode 074 - Perspectives on Personal Branding
April 13, 2021
This episode of The Indy Author Podcast is a bit of a departure. Most of the episodes focus on one person's perspective on a variety of topics, but this episode is going to focus on many people's perspective on one topic, and that topic is PERSONAL BRANDING.
I solicited perspectives on personal branding from previous guests of the podcast, and I'd like to thank the following for answering the call: Tiffany Yates Martin, Dale L. Roberts, Michael La Ronn, Joanna Penn, Robert Blake Whitehill, Lee Savino, Pauline Wiles, and Wade Walton.
Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!
Hello, fellow creative voyagers! This week's episode of The Indy Author Podcast is a bit of a departure. Most of the episodes focus on one person's perspective on a variety of topics, but this episode is going to focus on many people's perspective on one topic, and that topic is PERSONAL BRANDING. You’ll be hearing perspectives from a whole bunch of folks you’ve heard on previous episodes: Tiffany Yates Martin, Dale L. Roberts, Michael La Ronn, Joanna Penn, Robert Blake Whitehill, Lee Savino, Pauline Wiles, and Wade Walton.
These are just some of the many guests who have shared their knowledge with listeners. Most recently …
Pauline Wiles, who in Episode 073, AUTHOR WEBSITES, discussed easy fixes for common website problems; design guidelines that create a site that is both engaging and easy to maintain; and some free tools that can help you make your site look like a pro designed it.
Robert Blake Whitehill, who is Episode 072, MENTORING AND COLLABORATING WITH INTERNS, described how he determined what work he asks his interns to do and the responsibilities he had as their sponsor.
MK Williams, who in Episode 071, THE PROVIDER SIDE OF AUTHOR SERVICES, discussed the importance of establishing a network within the community you want to serve.
... and many more.
With an expanding set of resources available via the podcast and at theindyauthor.com, I’ve set up a Patreon account to solicit your support. Patreon enables you to support the creators who provide content that you benefit from by pledging a regular financial contribution—in my case, $3 per month—which you can start and stop as you wish.
Becoming a Patreon subscriber not only lets me know that you benefit from these resources, but also helps defray the costs of producing the podcast and of maintaining the website.
To learn more about becoming a patron, please head over to patreon.com/theindyauthor—and that’s indy with a Y—or go to theindyauthor.com and click on the Podcast tab … and check out my updated video introduction while you’re there!
If you’d like to make an occasional contribution, perhaps to indicate the value that a specific episode or resource provided to you on your creative voyage, scroll to the bottom of any page at theindyauthor.com and click on the Buy Me a Coffee link to make a small contribution via PayPal or Stripe.
Thanks to all of you for considering supporting my work at The Indy Author!
*****
Since I get quite a bit of airtime in this week’s episode, I’m going to forego a personal update, except to say that on the publishing front, I’m preparing for the launch of Ann Kinnear 4: A FURNACE FOR YOUR FOE on April 26, which I’ll be celebrating with a Facebook Live event. If you’d like to join the celebration, just go to the Events tab on my author page, Matty Dalrymple. And on the writing front, I’m working away on the novel I plan to launch later this year—more about that upcoming.
*****
As I mentioned, today’s episode is a bit of a departure: a format I’d like to use for future episodes, which I’m calling “Perspectives on ….” I sent out a request to all the guests of the first 73 episodes of the podcast and asked them to provide their perspectives on PERSONAL BRANDING. Here’s the email I sent:
I'd love it if you would consider sending me a video snippet of your thoughts on personal branding: What has and hasn't worked for you? For others? What is valuable advice you've received? What is advice you wish you hadn't received? What are common myths and misconceptions? How have you benefited from a focus on personal branding? Feel free to comment on any, all, or none of these specific questions—any thoughts that might prove useful to listeners of The Indy Author Podcast are fair game. Feel free to interpret the topic in a way that might be a bit unique.
I’d like to thank Tiffany Yates Martin, Dale L. Roberts, Michael La Ronn, Joanna Penn, Robert Blake Whitehill, Lee Savino, Pauline Wiles, and Wade Walton.… for answering the call.
I love that everyone brought very different perspectives to the topic and offered everything from a more philosophical considerations to great tactical advice. ...
These are just some of the many guests who have shared their knowledge with listeners. Most recently …
Pauline Wiles, who in Episode 073, AUTHOR WEBSITES, discussed easy fixes for common website problems; design guidelines that create a site that is both engaging and easy to maintain; and some free tools that can help you make your site look like a pro designed it.
Robert Blake Whitehill, who is Episode 072, MENTORING AND COLLABORATING WITH INTERNS, described how he determined what work he asks his interns to do and the responsibilities he had as their sponsor.
MK Williams, who in Episode 071, THE PROVIDER SIDE OF AUTHOR SERVICES, discussed the importance of establishing a network within the community you want to serve.
... and many more.
With an expanding set of resources available via the podcast and at theindyauthor.com, I’ve set up a Patreon account to solicit your support. Patreon enables you to support the creators who provide content that you benefit from by pledging a regular financial contribution—in my case, $3 per month—which you can start and stop as you wish.
Becoming a Patreon subscriber not only lets me know that you benefit from these resources, but also helps defray the costs of producing the podcast and of maintaining the website.
To learn more about becoming a patron, please head over to patreon.com/theindyauthor—and that’s indy with a Y—or go to theindyauthor.com and click on the Podcast tab … and check out my updated video introduction while you’re there!
If you’d like to make an occasional contribution, perhaps to indicate the value that a specific episode or resource provided to you on your creative voyage, scroll to the bottom of any page at theindyauthor.com and click on the Buy Me a Coffee link to make a small contribution via PayPal or Stripe.
Thanks to all of you for considering supporting my work at The Indy Author!
*****
Since I get quite a bit of airtime in this week’s episode, I’m going to forego a personal update, except to say that on the publishing front, I’m preparing for the launch of Ann Kinnear 4: A FURNACE FOR YOUR FOE on April 26, which I’ll be celebrating with a Facebook Live event. If you’d like to join the celebration, just go to the Events tab on my author page, Matty Dalrymple. And on the writing front, I’m working away on the novel I plan to launch later this year—more about that upcoming.
*****
As I mentioned, today’s episode is a bit of a departure: a format I’d like to use for future episodes, which I’m calling “Perspectives on ….” I sent out a request to all the guests of the first 73 episodes of the podcast and asked them to provide their perspectives on PERSONAL BRANDING. Here’s the email I sent:
I'd love it if you would consider sending me a video snippet of your thoughts on personal branding: What has and hasn't worked for you? For others? What is valuable advice you've received? What is advice you wish you hadn't received? What are common myths and misconceptions? How have you benefited from a focus on personal branding? Feel free to comment on any, all, or none of these specific questions—any thoughts that might prove useful to listeners of The Indy Author Podcast are fair game. Feel free to interpret the topic in a way that might be a bit unique.
I’d like to thank Tiffany Yates Martin, Dale L. Roberts, Michael La Ronn, Joanna Penn, Robert Blake Whitehill, Lee Savino, Pauline Wiles, and Wade Walton.… for answering the call.
I love that everyone brought very different perspectives to the topic and offered everything from a more philosophical considerations to great tactical advice. ...
click here to read more
Tiffany Yates Martin
I’m going to start out with the perspective of Tiffany Yates Martin. Tiffany has spent nearly thirty years as an editor in the publishing industry and is the author of INTUITIVE EDITING: A CREATIVE AND PRACTICAL GUIDE TO REVISING YOUR WRITING. She’s a two-time guest:
Episode 053 - What Authors can Learn from TV and Movies with Tiffany Yates Martin
Episode 065 - X-raying Your Plot with Tiffany Yates Martin
I wanted to start out with Tiffany’s perspective because it addresses one of the primary concerns about this tricky topic … the fact that it can feel a bit creepy. Let’s hear what Tiffany has to say …
Hi, I'm Tiffany Yates, Martin, the founder of Fox Print Editorial and a career book editor, author of INTUITIVE EDITING and, Matty, and you've asked me to talk a little bit about personal branding. That's one of those phrases that kind of makes me cringe because it's like networking. It just sounds a little bit cheesy and inauthentic. I don't know that I set out to do personal branding as such, but I do have my business ethos North Star. So when I sat down to write INTUITIVE EDITING, when I write blog posts for authors, when I'm developing a webinar or presenting a webinar for authors or a workshop, I literally center myself beforehand every single time by just reminding myself what that North Star is, and for me it's, I want to help authors. I want to take what can often be overwhelming and confusing craft advice and craft knowledge, and I want to distill it down in ways that are really useful and helpful and actionable for authors. So if I just remind myself of that, it keeps me focused and centered.
[00:01:04] And what I have found over the years, and I've been doing this a little over 25 years, I do have a very engaged subscriber base. And I feel like it's because of this, because I'm always trying, not so much to publicize or do personal branding, but just to be true to what that central tenet for me of what I want to do, what drives me, what my passion is for what I'm doing. I think if we think of personal branding more as that kind of thing, it feels much more genuine.
[00:01:32] And it really is just connecting with people on a level of common interest. There's a marketing expert called Dan Blank who has a regular newsletter and a company called WeGrowMedia and his whole central message is about human centered marketing. That's his phrase. And I really love it because to me it's less about, how can I get followers? How can I get subscribers? And more about how can I connect with the authors who I want to reach to be able to offer whatever knowledge I have to? And if I keep true to that, then I feel like that becomes my personal brand in a way that feels organic and authentic to me, and hopefully it comes across that way to others.
I really like Tiffany’s advice that knowing what your North Star statement of your purpose is can make the whole idea of who you are—certainly one of the purposes of personal branding—a lot more comfortable and, more importantly, a lot more motivating, both to yourself and to the people you want to connect with.
Dale L. Roberts
Next up is the perspective from Dale L. Roberts. Dale is a fitness author, video content creator, and self-publishing advocate. Voted by Feedspot among the Top 100 websites and Top 50 YouTube channels devoted to self-publishing, Self-Publishing with Dale. Dale is also a two-time guest:
Episode 034 - Connecting through Video with Dale L. Roberts
Episode 044 - Using Aggregators versus Going Direct with Dale L. Roberts
I really like how Dale’s perspective echoes some of what Tiffany had to say, but from a slightly different perspective …
What has or hasn't worked for you as far as personal branding? When it comes to personal branding, I discovered one of the things was not getting good on my audience.
Not knowing who my audience was a real decider on whether people would invest in my products, invest in my books, and invest in me as a brand and such. When I finally got a good on who my audience was, I was able to tailor what I was doing, how I was delivering, how I was speaking. And everything else just fell into place.
For others. Ooh, man, it's tough to speak on the part of other people and personal branding and what it has or has not done for them. But I always notice the same thing that whatever an author or even somebody who's trying to put together a personal brand doesn't understand who their audience is, there becomes a disconnect. In fact, I see it even more so, it's more measurable because you can see it on YouTube, where a person has a number of subscribers or even a number of views on a specific video. Yes, sometimes those are vanity metrics, but at the end of the day, you can certainly see that if somebody has say only six subscribers and maybe three views per video over the last five years and have hundreds of videos, there's a disconnect between who they are and the audience they're wanting to get. And they're not resonating with that audience in some capacity. So yeah, you got to get good with who you want and communicate with.
What valuable advice have you received? This is a story I come back to time and again. Mark Stafford, a marketing expert out in Arizona, good friend of Kelly and mine, we went to meet up with him when I had my first book, I handed it over to him and I was super, super excited about it. And he says, who's this book for? And I was like, it's for everyone. He's like, how could it be for everyone? It was a book on health and fitness. There's no way that it could be for everyone.
And he's so is this exercise good for kids? I was like, yeah. Is it good for senior citizens? Yeah. He's wait, hang on. How could you be giving exercise advice that would be good for kids and senior citizens? There's going to be a complete disconnect here. You gotta get to know who your audience is because otherwise you're going to be lost. That's the value advice that I got early on. And you can apply that whether in books, you can do it to business, anything in general. Could be book publishing, video publishing, social media marketing.
What advice you wish you hadn't received? I never got bad advice from anybody when it comes to personal branding. Maybe it was because I was following the right people. I've never heard anything specific that maybe didn't resonate with me. There's been some times where I disagree with some people.There's always the passion versus profit end of things. Some people believe you should chase your passion and the profit will come in due time. And others believe you need profit in order to actually keep your head above the water. That way you can get into your passion. I don't believe both of them should be mutually exclusive. It just really depends on the position that you're in and where you're at. So if you don't have the revenue to chase your passion, then you're going to clearly need to do something that's going to be profit-driven until you can do something passion-driven. And so hopefully that makes sense.
What are common myths and misconceptions? People believe that in order to be successful with your personal brand, that you've got to sacrifice a bit of who you are, that you've got to sacrifice your integrity, that you have to sell out. And to me, I don't think you need to sell out when it comes to personal branding. At first, it's going to be a grind because no one knows who you are. No one knows what you're about. And you can't just simply set up a lemonade stand on the corner as a personal brand and expect for people to come over and drink your lemonade. They don't know who you are. You're going to need to display that you are someone who's worth trusting, someone that they can invest their know , like, and trust factor. So it's going to take some time, honestly.
When it comes to misconceptions. I think with personal branding, a lot of people think that if they just set up their proverbial lemonade stand, that people are going to come flocking to them. But that's just not true. If there's no such thing as an overnight sensation. It took me about five years to really get good traction on my YouTube channel. Technically I would say probably two years was just grinding it out, trying to get things going. Same thing went for my brand as an author. It took me about two years to the day of me starting that I really saw good traction as an author.
How have you benefited from a focus on personal branding? Getting good on my personal brand and knowing who I am, being comfortable with my message and who my audience was, has helped me out in a variety of ways. The most notable way is, gosh, I hate to say this and it's not like me trying to flex my paychecks or tell you my monthly earnings reports or anything else like that. But it has afforded me a lifestyle in which I don't have to answer to a boss. I don't have to clock in or clock out. I can dictate my own hours. I get to choose what I want to do and what I don't want to do. So I think that's really the biggest, most notable thing. That I can spend time with my wife. If I want to lay on the couch and snuggle with my cat, I can do that. If I want to play video games, I can. Conversely speaking, obviously I still need to put in the work. Don't think that I'm just doing the four hour work week. I'm definitely putting in the work, but that's the biggest benefit that I've seen with my personal brand and getting rewarded with that.
And the other thing is having the opportunity,some people call me an influencer and with that title and that belief that I'm an "influencer." It allows me certain privileges. Sometimes I get free products. Sometimes I get shout outs. Sometimes I get sponsorships. I get more things than what I did when I was a lot smaller as a personal brand. So that part is really cool. I really like that. So here lately, I try to pay it forward and send some of those benefits to some of the indie authors are struggling within the community. You can actually see that in a show I just started, a pilot episode called BOOK RESCUE, where I was able to leverage my ability to reach to some of these brands and pay it forward to somebody who really did need it in the indy author community.
Tiffany’s perspective focused on the importance of knowing yourself and what your drivers are. Dale’s perspective focused on knowing what specific group of people you can serve. But both of them emphasize the importance of focusing on what you can do for your audience, not what your audience can do for you.
I also liked Dale’s comment that following your passion—which sounds a lot like Tiffany’s North Star—doesn’t mean that it can’t also become an income-earning profession.
And I liked what both of them said or implied: that personal branding shouldn’t mean selling out.
Michael La Ronn
Next we’re going to hear from Michael La Ronn, who appeared in …
Episode 055 - The Costs of Self-publishing a Book with Michael La Ronn
Michael introduces himself in this clip, so let’s jump right in …
Hi there. My name is Michael La Ronn with authorlevelup.com and I'm the author of over 50 science fiction and fantasy novels and self-help books for writers. And I also run the popular YouTube channel Author Level Up. And Matty asked me to come on to talk about personal branding. And I got to tell you, this is not something that I really learned that well early on in my career.
And it's not something you hear about very often in our community. I had to learn personal branding the hard way, because the reality is that branding is everything you do. Everything. Let me explain. See when readers come across you for the first time on the interwebs. You have a split second to make a good first impression, just like I have a split second to make a good first impression to you with this video. Your book cover is a split second.
They make that decision on whether they want to buy that book in a split-second, don't they? They make a decision on you, the author, whether you're someone who's interesting to them based on your author photo. Based on the way you conduct yourself. Based on maybe some posts they've seen on Facebook. So this is why branding is everything you do.
And I had to learn all of this with the school of hard knocks. I've got several diplomas from there. And one of the things that I learned is that sometimes what you don't do also brands you. Think about it like this. If you conduct yourself as an author in a professional way, readers are going to notice that.
And if they happen to like your books, which I hope that they will, that is going to pour gasoline on them becoming advocates for your brand. Now, my friends who have ever worked at a corporation or a very large company, you already know everything you need to know about personal branding. Because every day you show up to work is an interview.
Isn't it? that's a good way to think about your personal branding as an author. Every time your brand comes across a reader, that's an interview. And if you think about it like that, you'll think about it correctly. So to bring this home, I'm going to give you a piece of advice that I wish someone had given to me and pass it on to you.
And that is on a piece of paper, write down all of the touch points that someone has with your brand. And these are not necessarily all touchpoints that you control. So we can talk about your website. We can talk about your Facebook page or other social media outpost pages. But what about your Google results?
How do you show up when someone types your name on Google or on Bing? How do you show up when someone just happens to be looking for a podcast and you're the first interview that shows up. What about someone who emails you? So I want you to think about all the places you can control and all the places that you can't necessarily control.
And then what I want you to start thinking about is what should the reader experience be? It's a deep, profound question. But if you ask that question, you can then start thinking about what you want to convey to people from a personal branding standpoint. And another piece of information that I'll tell you is that once you have all of this laid out, you'll start to find some commonalities and you'll start to say, hey, oh yeah, if someone goes to my website, I want them to think X. And if they go to my Amazon author page or another retailer page, yeah, I definitely want them to think X too. And so you can start to find some commonalities and you can start to figure out what that story is. And the last piece of advice that I'll leave you with is that sometimes it can take a long time to figure out what you want your author brand to be.
Sometimes you're not going to know when you're writing your first book. Sometimes it takes years to find out what that is. I know that's the case for me and it's still quite frankly a work in progress. Don't beat yourself up if the right words or the right designs or the right colors or whatever that might be isn't coming to you because it will come to you in time.
And you can also learn a lot about how you're being perceived by what readers say about you. So just keep that in mind as well, that branding, it's not all about what you think and what you want to project onto the world. It's also about how people are perceiving you as well. So if you like this my name is Michael La Ronn with Author Level Up. We'd love to have you join me at authorlevelup.com and continue the conversation. So thank you for watching and thank you to Matty for having me.
What I love about Michael’s perspective is that it makes it clear that you are establishing a personal brand with every contact you have with the people you want to reach—and maybe even with people you don’t want to reach—and that they are as active in the creation of your author brand as you are.
Something that those of you who are watching the video will see is that Michael shot that video in a number of different snippets, each one located in a different part of what I believe is his home. It was obviously an intentional choice, and the message I took from it is that Michael is inviting us into his home and into his life … and branding doesn’t get much more personal than that.
Joanna Penn
This emphasis on the *personal* of personal branding continues in this clip Joanna Penn, The Creative Penn.
Joanna is an award-nominated, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers as J.F. Penn. As an award-winning creative entrepreneur, she also writes non-fiction for authors and hosts The Creative Penn Podcast.
This clip is from Episode 054 - Futurist Trends We Can Prepare for Now with Joanna Penn, and the topic of that episode meant that much of what we talked about was technology-related. However, when it comes right down to it, Joanna believes that we can’t beat the machine, so we have to double down on being human.
As much as we can network online, meeting people physically is still going to make a difference. I also think that what we've seen on both sides of your American political spectrum is a backlash against big tech. So we may find that these tools are not even available. There's been action in Congress against Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple around their domination in some of these areas. So it may be that the tools we take for granted may change in the next few years. So having a personal brand, building your email list, building a channel you can speak to people, means that you can make money in these other ways. So you can email people about a Kickstarter or you can put out a podcast episode and have patrons pay for that. So, yeah, I definitely think that personal brand is more important.
Our readers and followers want us to be human, and the next clip talks about the most obvious way they identify us with the creative work we produce—our author name—and how it becomes attached to things beyond just our books.
Robert Blake Whitehill
Robert Blake Whitehill is yet another two-time guest:
Episode 008 - Screenwriting with Robert Blake Whitehill
Episode 072 - Mentoring and Collaborating with Interns with Robert Blake Whitehill
Personal branding is a very important topic for authors. You are the brand, essentially. It's your name, as it appears on the books, and any thoughts that you'd care to discuss as they pertain to topics and themes in your books. Those are very important starting places. For instance, my Ben Blackshaw books deal with the Chesapeake Bay. They deal with the use of media and manipulation of media.
When I talk about the Chesapeake Bay, I'm often talking about the environment as it pertains to the Chesapeake. So those are areas where I'm basically doing authority branding, but it's personal branding. I think anytime that you can complement the work that you're doing that appears in print with videos or additional writing or blogs about that topic, so that it's your book adjacent, that expands the personal branding. I've been called to discuss any number of different topics outside the realm of writing fiction. And I think that all begins with having myself and my name be the brand in all social media aspects. You don't want to brand a book.
You don't want to have a necessarily a social media page for a book because you want the flexibility to fold in any aspect of your work, be it screenwriting, be it a book series, a second book series. It all comes under the heading of your name.
We’re moving from more strategic or philosophical perspectives to more tactical perspectives, and you’ll see that in this next perspective …
Lee Savino
Lee Savino is a USA Today bestselling author. She moderates the Facebook group MILLIONAIRE AUTHOR MASTERMIND and is the instructor, along with Nicholas Erik, of the SIX FIGURE AUTHOR MARKETING CHALLENGE. Lee joined me for Episode 058 to talk about Author Newsletters.
The clip I’ll be sharing is from Lee’s Build Your Bestselling Author Brand course, so not surprisingly, she’s focused on specific tactical advice about building your brand. Have a listen …
I was writing with a publisher and I wrote these romance novels and they had these covers and they'd never sold as well as I think they could have sold. And the reason for that is very simple. I needed different covers. I had great blurbs. I had great stories. And I asked the publisher for different covers, and they said, sure, and then never did anything. But for now I just forged forward and I said, okay, I'm going to study the market and I'm going to see what's going on. I read a book series by Vanessa Vale, she was in a very hot sub sub genre. And I was like, you know what, that's what I want to do with my career. I wrote that down.
And I also watched another author. I really modeled my books after Madison Faye. I was watching her books zoom to the top andI went to my cover artist and I said, Hey, I have this swipe file full of covers I like, and can you make me covers like this? And she said, yes. And she did. And that is part of it. That's key. I was speaking the readers' language. I was writing what I liked to write and I decided to market it in a way like to market in, and then my readers love it. I'm really proud of what I did and that's all that really matters. Willow Winters, she was another author model.
She had these amazing blurbs. Oh my God. I loved these blurbs. I literally cut paste this into a file, and studied these blurbs, studied them. And then when I sat down to write a blurb, I would write a blurb like this. Now, if you go to my series, this is my point, these were my models, but when you look at my cover and you read my books, you are not going to think about Vanessa Vale's series. You're not really thinking about Madison Faye's covers or Willow Winters' blurbs. It is totally my brand. Totally. And I'm really proud of that. I'm so proud of what I've done. So I went in hard on this series. I had author models. I didn't plagiarize them, but I copied them. I stole their success. I said, I want covers like this. I want blurbs like this And I attracted a bunch of readers who loved the world. I gave him more of what they wanted.
What I liked about Lee’s comments is that you don’t have to construct your personal brand from a blank slate—you can model your brand presence on other authors who are achieving what you want to achieve and reaching the readers you want to reach. The best part about this advice is that it doesn’t have to be a cold-blooded mimicking of other’s work: Lee has made readers happy while pursuing her books and brand in a way she’s not just happy with, but proud of.
Pauline Wiles
Next we’re going to hear from Pauline Wiles. Pauline is a website designer who builds simple, stylish sites for authors and writers, helping to dispel some of the myths around how difficult – and costly – a web project should be. Pauline is yet another two-time guest:
Episode 027 - Why to Stop Blogging ... and What to Do Instead with Pauline Wiles
Episode 073 - Author Websites with Pauline Wiles
And as a website designer, it’s not surprising that Pauline has some great tips for the visual side of personal branding …
Hello Indy Author friends. I am Pauline Wiles. I am an author and website designer. Personal branding can seem like a bit of a mysterious and daunting topic. And if you're only just getting started with it, it can be pretty hard to know how to get your arms around it. Ideally, you will spend a lot of time thinking about your brand and how you want to show up in the world.
But if you need a quick route for getting going then as an author, my best advice to you is pay really careful attention to your book covers. Your book covers, of course, represent the type of writing you do, your genre, and should say something about how you want to come across to your readers. So in fact, these are all great ingredients for your personal brand. Make sure your book covers, if you have more than one book, , um, show some kind of consistency. So pay attention that the fonts and colors and overall , um, approach to your covers are in the same family, and you'll be off to a great start.
So my words of caution for you, be careful if you're using a low cost cover design service. Generally speaking, those folks don't have the time or the strategic input to really look after your brand as a whole. They're working very fast and you could end up with very different looking covers for each book.
And then also as a website designer, if an author comes to me with one book published and he or she says, I don't want my website to look like my book cover. My book cover isn't really how I want to come across on my website, then that really breaks my heart because there's clearly a disconnect there between the way the book is representing you and what you want your brand to be.
So if in doubt, keep an eye on your covers, they are a really strong representation of you. They're how you show up most often in front of your readers. And if you get those right to keep some consistency, then your personal brand will have a really strong foundation.
I’m a big fan of consistency in visual presentation … in fact, I thought I’d share an excerpt from my book THE INDY AUTHOR’S GUIDE TO PODCASTING FOR AUTHORS what addresses this:
The world’s most successful products have an immediately identifiable brand: the Starbucks’ siren, the Apple apple, the Nike swoosh. But as individuals, and especially as creatives, it’s sometimes hard to think about how to apply the concept of branding to our own work. Of course, the nautical world provides a metaphor: a ship’s livery.
In the cruise ship world, livery refers to the design and paint scheme used on the ship’s exterior, which often include variations on or references to the company’s logos and symbols. For example, Cunard ships are easily recognizable by their black hulls and red funnels, livery that has remained largely unchanged for almost 200 years. A glance across a busy harbor would confirm that you’re looking at a Cunard ocean liner, not a Celebrity or Royal Caribbean cruise ship, and the recognizable Cunard livery would telegraph a message about the experience you would expect aboard that ship.
Similarly, the “livery” of your podcast should telegraph the aspect of your podcast that sets it apart from others, and those characteristics will help listeners identify with you as an individual, not merely as an anonymous voice behind the microphone.
As many of you know, I share my podcast content in both audio and video, and some of the information I share about the livery of The Indy Author Podcast applies to my video presence: for example, having a pleasing background that subtly references the nautical metaphors I like to use for the writing craft and the publishing voyage, or wearing consistent and understated clothes and accessories so that the viewer’s attention is on my guest rather than on me.
Wade Walton
Wade Walton, who was one of my very first guests—in Episode 002 - Creativity Tips—is a television producer, as well as a photographer, writer, musician, and motivational trainer—and he has some tips to share about video and what it says about your personal brand.
Hi, this is Wade Walton with a comment on personal branding. Online, with so much of our lives spent in front of webcams, it's a terrific storytelling opportunity that can build rapport and help colleagues and friends understand you better. I'm a video producer and a musician who loves the outdoors, and I've reflected that in every aspect of my video space. My lighting and framing demonstrate my profession, while the scene is styled, simply with textiles and some of my musical equipment telling a simple but effective story of who I am. Spend some time thinking about your personal brand and how you can build it with your online scene.
So there you have it: “Perspectives on Personal Branding.” I’d summarize the perspectives of my guests by saying that personal branding encompasses three parties: yourself, the people you want to reach, and others who are reaching the people you want to reach in a way you want to reach them. You need to ensure that your personal brand is true to your own North Star and to your passion, you need to ensure it provides value to the people you want to reach, and you can look to the success of others for ways to develop your own unique personal brand.
Thanks again to Tiffany Yates Martin, Dale L. Roberts, Michael La Ronn, Joanna Penn, Robert Blake Whitehill, Lee Savino, Pauline Wiles, and Wade Walton for sharing their perspectives!
*****
I hope you enjoyed this “Perspectives on” episode. I’d love to hear any thoughts it triggered for you regarding personal branding, and any actions you plan to take as a result. Please also let me know if you liked the format—getting to hear many different perspectives on one topic—and, if you did, I’d love your suggestions for future “Perspectives on” topics!
I’m going to start out with the perspective of Tiffany Yates Martin. Tiffany has spent nearly thirty years as an editor in the publishing industry and is the author of INTUITIVE EDITING: A CREATIVE AND PRACTICAL GUIDE TO REVISING YOUR WRITING. She’s a two-time guest:
Episode 053 - What Authors can Learn from TV and Movies with Tiffany Yates Martin
Episode 065 - X-raying Your Plot with Tiffany Yates Martin
I wanted to start out with Tiffany’s perspective because it addresses one of the primary concerns about this tricky topic … the fact that it can feel a bit creepy. Let’s hear what Tiffany has to say …
Hi, I'm Tiffany Yates, Martin, the founder of Fox Print Editorial and a career book editor, author of INTUITIVE EDITING and, Matty, and you've asked me to talk a little bit about personal branding. That's one of those phrases that kind of makes me cringe because it's like networking. It just sounds a little bit cheesy and inauthentic. I don't know that I set out to do personal branding as such, but I do have my business ethos North Star. So when I sat down to write INTUITIVE EDITING, when I write blog posts for authors, when I'm developing a webinar or presenting a webinar for authors or a workshop, I literally center myself beforehand every single time by just reminding myself what that North Star is, and for me it's, I want to help authors. I want to take what can often be overwhelming and confusing craft advice and craft knowledge, and I want to distill it down in ways that are really useful and helpful and actionable for authors. So if I just remind myself of that, it keeps me focused and centered.
[00:01:04] And what I have found over the years, and I've been doing this a little over 25 years, I do have a very engaged subscriber base. And I feel like it's because of this, because I'm always trying, not so much to publicize or do personal branding, but just to be true to what that central tenet for me of what I want to do, what drives me, what my passion is for what I'm doing. I think if we think of personal branding more as that kind of thing, it feels much more genuine.
[00:01:32] And it really is just connecting with people on a level of common interest. There's a marketing expert called Dan Blank who has a regular newsletter and a company called WeGrowMedia and his whole central message is about human centered marketing. That's his phrase. And I really love it because to me it's less about, how can I get followers? How can I get subscribers? And more about how can I connect with the authors who I want to reach to be able to offer whatever knowledge I have to? And if I keep true to that, then I feel like that becomes my personal brand in a way that feels organic and authentic to me, and hopefully it comes across that way to others.
I really like Tiffany’s advice that knowing what your North Star statement of your purpose is can make the whole idea of who you are—certainly one of the purposes of personal branding—a lot more comfortable and, more importantly, a lot more motivating, both to yourself and to the people you want to connect with.
Dale L. Roberts
Next up is the perspective from Dale L. Roberts. Dale is a fitness author, video content creator, and self-publishing advocate. Voted by Feedspot among the Top 100 websites and Top 50 YouTube channels devoted to self-publishing, Self-Publishing with Dale. Dale is also a two-time guest:
Episode 034 - Connecting through Video with Dale L. Roberts
Episode 044 - Using Aggregators versus Going Direct with Dale L. Roberts
I really like how Dale’s perspective echoes some of what Tiffany had to say, but from a slightly different perspective …
What has or hasn't worked for you as far as personal branding? When it comes to personal branding, I discovered one of the things was not getting good on my audience.
Not knowing who my audience was a real decider on whether people would invest in my products, invest in my books, and invest in me as a brand and such. When I finally got a good on who my audience was, I was able to tailor what I was doing, how I was delivering, how I was speaking. And everything else just fell into place.
For others. Ooh, man, it's tough to speak on the part of other people and personal branding and what it has or has not done for them. But I always notice the same thing that whatever an author or even somebody who's trying to put together a personal brand doesn't understand who their audience is, there becomes a disconnect. In fact, I see it even more so, it's more measurable because you can see it on YouTube, where a person has a number of subscribers or even a number of views on a specific video. Yes, sometimes those are vanity metrics, but at the end of the day, you can certainly see that if somebody has say only six subscribers and maybe three views per video over the last five years and have hundreds of videos, there's a disconnect between who they are and the audience they're wanting to get. And they're not resonating with that audience in some capacity. So yeah, you got to get good with who you want and communicate with.
What valuable advice have you received? This is a story I come back to time and again. Mark Stafford, a marketing expert out in Arizona, good friend of Kelly and mine, we went to meet up with him when I had my first book, I handed it over to him and I was super, super excited about it. And he says, who's this book for? And I was like, it's for everyone. He's like, how could it be for everyone? It was a book on health and fitness. There's no way that it could be for everyone.
And he's so is this exercise good for kids? I was like, yeah. Is it good for senior citizens? Yeah. He's wait, hang on. How could you be giving exercise advice that would be good for kids and senior citizens? There's going to be a complete disconnect here. You gotta get to know who your audience is because otherwise you're going to be lost. That's the value advice that I got early on. And you can apply that whether in books, you can do it to business, anything in general. Could be book publishing, video publishing, social media marketing.
What advice you wish you hadn't received? I never got bad advice from anybody when it comes to personal branding. Maybe it was because I was following the right people. I've never heard anything specific that maybe didn't resonate with me. There's been some times where I disagree with some people.There's always the passion versus profit end of things. Some people believe you should chase your passion and the profit will come in due time. And others believe you need profit in order to actually keep your head above the water. That way you can get into your passion. I don't believe both of them should be mutually exclusive. It just really depends on the position that you're in and where you're at. So if you don't have the revenue to chase your passion, then you're going to clearly need to do something that's going to be profit-driven until you can do something passion-driven. And so hopefully that makes sense.
What are common myths and misconceptions? People believe that in order to be successful with your personal brand, that you've got to sacrifice a bit of who you are, that you've got to sacrifice your integrity, that you have to sell out. And to me, I don't think you need to sell out when it comes to personal branding. At first, it's going to be a grind because no one knows who you are. No one knows what you're about. And you can't just simply set up a lemonade stand on the corner as a personal brand and expect for people to come over and drink your lemonade. They don't know who you are. You're going to need to display that you are someone who's worth trusting, someone that they can invest their know , like, and trust factor. So it's going to take some time, honestly.
When it comes to misconceptions. I think with personal branding, a lot of people think that if they just set up their proverbial lemonade stand, that people are going to come flocking to them. But that's just not true. If there's no such thing as an overnight sensation. It took me about five years to really get good traction on my YouTube channel. Technically I would say probably two years was just grinding it out, trying to get things going. Same thing went for my brand as an author. It took me about two years to the day of me starting that I really saw good traction as an author.
How have you benefited from a focus on personal branding? Getting good on my personal brand and knowing who I am, being comfortable with my message and who my audience was, has helped me out in a variety of ways. The most notable way is, gosh, I hate to say this and it's not like me trying to flex my paychecks or tell you my monthly earnings reports or anything else like that. But it has afforded me a lifestyle in which I don't have to answer to a boss. I don't have to clock in or clock out. I can dictate my own hours. I get to choose what I want to do and what I don't want to do. So I think that's really the biggest, most notable thing. That I can spend time with my wife. If I want to lay on the couch and snuggle with my cat, I can do that. If I want to play video games, I can. Conversely speaking, obviously I still need to put in the work. Don't think that I'm just doing the four hour work week. I'm definitely putting in the work, but that's the biggest benefit that I've seen with my personal brand and getting rewarded with that.
And the other thing is having the opportunity,some people call me an influencer and with that title and that belief that I'm an "influencer." It allows me certain privileges. Sometimes I get free products. Sometimes I get shout outs. Sometimes I get sponsorships. I get more things than what I did when I was a lot smaller as a personal brand. So that part is really cool. I really like that. So here lately, I try to pay it forward and send some of those benefits to some of the indie authors are struggling within the community. You can actually see that in a show I just started, a pilot episode called BOOK RESCUE, where I was able to leverage my ability to reach to some of these brands and pay it forward to somebody who really did need it in the indy author community.
Tiffany’s perspective focused on the importance of knowing yourself and what your drivers are. Dale’s perspective focused on knowing what specific group of people you can serve. But both of them emphasize the importance of focusing on what you can do for your audience, not what your audience can do for you.
I also liked Dale’s comment that following your passion—which sounds a lot like Tiffany’s North Star—doesn’t mean that it can’t also become an income-earning profession.
And I liked what both of them said or implied: that personal branding shouldn’t mean selling out.
Michael La Ronn
Next we’re going to hear from Michael La Ronn, who appeared in …
Episode 055 - The Costs of Self-publishing a Book with Michael La Ronn
Michael introduces himself in this clip, so let’s jump right in …
Hi there. My name is Michael La Ronn with authorlevelup.com and I'm the author of over 50 science fiction and fantasy novels and self-help books for writers. And I also run the popular YouTube channel Author Level Up. And Matty asked me to come on to talk about personal branding. And I got to tell you, this is not something that I really learned that well early on in my career.
And it's not something you hear about very often in our community. I had to learn personal branding the hard way, because the reality is that branding is everything you do. Everything. Let me explain. See when readers come across you for the first time on the interwebs. You have a split second to make a good first impression, just like I have a split second to make a good first impression to you with this video. Your book cover is a split second.
They make that decision on whether they want to buy that book in a split-second, don't they? They make a decision on you, the author, whether you're someone who's interesting to them based on your author photo. Based on the way you conduct yourself. Based on maybe some posts they've seen on Facebook. So this is why branding is everything you do.
And I had to learn all of this with the school of hard knocks. I've got several diplomas from there. And one of the things that I learned is that sometimes what you don't do also brands you. Think about it like this. If you conduct yourself as an author in a professional way, readers are going to notice that.
And if they happen to like your books, which I hope that they will, that is going to pour gasoline on them becoming advocates for your brand. Now, my friends who have ever worked at a corporation or a very large company, you already know everything you need to know about personal branding. Because every day you show up to work is an interview.
Isn't it? that's a good way to think about your personal branding as an author. Every time your brand comes across a reader, that's an interview. And if you think about it like that, you'll think about it correctly. So to bring this home, I'm going to give you a piece of advice that I wish someone had given to me and pass it on to you.
And that is on a piece of paper, write down all of the touch points that someone has with your brand. And these are not necessarily all touchpoints that you control. So we can talk about your website. We can talk about your Facebook page or other social media outpost pages. But what about your Google results?
How do you show up when someone types your name on Google or on Bing? How do you show up when someone just happens to be looking for a podcast and you're the first interview that shows up. What about someone who emails you? So I want you to think about all the places you can control and all the places that you can't necessarily control.
And then what I want you to start thinking about is what should the reader experience be? It's a deep, profound question. But if you ask that question, you can then start thinking about what you want to convey to people from a personal branding standpoint. And another piece of information that I'll tell you is that once you have all of this laid out, you'll start to find some commonalities and you'll start to say, hey, oh yeah, if someone goes to my website, I want them to think X. And if they go to my Amazon author page or another retailer page, yeah, I definitely want them to think X too. And so you can start to find some commonalities and you can start to figure out what that story is. And the last piece of advice that I'll leave you with is that sometimes it can take a long time to figure out what you want your author brand to be.
Sometimes you're not going to know when you're writing your first book. Sometimes it takes years to find out what that is. I know that's the case for me and it's still quite frankly a work in progress. Don't beat yourself up if the right words or the right designs or the right colors or whatever that might be isn't coming to you because it will come to you in time.
And you can also learn a lot about how you're being perceived by what readers say about you. So just keep that in mind as well, that branding, it's not all about what you think and what you want to project onto the world. It's also about how people are perceiving you as well. So if you like this my name is Michael La Ronn with Author Level Up. We'd love to have you join me at authorlevelup.com and continue the conversation. So thank you for watching and thank you to Matty for having me.
What I love about Michael’s perspective is that it makes it clear that you are establishing a personal brand with every contact you have with the people you want to reach—and maybe even with people you don’t want to reach—and that they are as active in the creation of your author brand as you are.
Something that those of you who are watching the video will see is that Michael shot that video in a number of different snippets, each one located in a different part of what I believe is his home. It was obviously an intentional choice, and the message I took from it is that Michael is inviting us into his home and into his life … and branding doesn’t get much more personal than that.
Joanna Penn
This emphasis on the *personal* of personal branding continues in this clip Joanna Penn, The Creative Penn.
Joanna is an award-nominated, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers as J.F. Penn. As an award-winning creative entrepreneur, she also writes non-fiction for authors and hosts The Creative Penn Podcast.
This clip is from Episode 054 - Futurist Trends We Can Prepare for Now with Joanna Penn, and the topic of that episode meant that much of what we talked about was technology-related. However, when it comes right down to it, Joanna believes that we can’t beat the machine, so we have to double down on being human.
As much as we can network online, meeting people physically is still going to make a difference. I also think that what we've seen on both sides of your American political spectrum is a backlash against big tech. So we may find that these tools are not even available. There's been action in Congress against Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple around their domination in some of these areas. So it may be that the tools we take for granted may change in the next few years. So having a personal brand, building your email list, building a channel you can speak to people, means that you can make money in these other ways. So you can email people about a Kickstarter or you can put out a podcast episode and have patrons pay for that. So, yeah, I definitely think that personal brand is more important.
Our readers and followers want us to be human, and the next clip talks about the most obvious way they identify us with the creative work we produce—our author name—and how it becomes attached to things beyond just our books.
Robert Blake Whitehill
Robert Blake Whitehill is yet another two-time guest:
Episode 008 - Screenwriting with Robert Blake Whitehill
Episode 072 - Mentoring and Collaborating with Interns with Robert Blake Whitehill
Personal branding is a very important topic for authors. You are the brand, essentially. It's your name, as it appears on the books, and any thoughts that you'd care to discuss as they pertain to topics and themes in your books. Those are very important starting places. For instance, my Ben Blackshaw books deal with the Chesapeake Bay. They deal with the use of media and manipulation of media.
When I talk about the Chesapeake Bay, I'm often talking about the environment as it pertains to the Chesapeake. So those are areas where I'm basically doing authority branding, but it's personal branding. I think anytime that you can complement the work that you're doing that appears in print with videos or additional writing or blogs about that topic, so that it's your book adjacent, that expands the personal branding. I've been called to discuss any number of different topics outside the realm of writing fiction. And I think that all begins with having myself and my name be the brand in all social media aspects. You don't want to brand a book.
You don't want to have a necessarily a social media page for a book because you want the flexibility to fold in any aspect of your work, be it screenwriting, be it a book series, a second book series. It all comes under the heading of your name.
We’re moving from more strategic or philosophical perspectives to more tactical perspectives, and you’ll see that in this next perspective …
Lee Savino
Lee Savino is a USA Today bestselling author. She moderates the Facebook group MILLIONAIRE AUTHOR MASTERMIND and is the instructor, along with Nicholas Erik, of the SIX FIGURE AUTHOR MARKETING CHALLENGE. Lee joined me for Episode 058 to talk about Author Newsletters.
The clip I’ll be sharing is from Lee’s Build Your Bestselling Author Brand course, so not surprisingly, she’s focused on specific tactical advice about building your brand. Have a listen …
I was writing with a publisher and I wrote these romance novels and they had these covers and they'd never sold as well as I think they could have sold. And the reason for that is very simple. I needed different covers. I had great blurbs. I had great stories. And I asked the publisher for different covers, and they said, sure, and then never did anything. But for now I just forged forward and I said, okay, I'm going to study the market and I'm going to see what's going on. I read a book series by Vanessa Vale, she was in a very hot sub sub genre. And I was like, you know what, that's what I want to do with my career. I wrote that down.
And I also watched another author. I really modeled my books after Madison Faye. I was watching her books zoom to the top andI went to my cover artist and I said, Hey, I have this swipe file full of covers I like, and can you make me covers like this? And she said, yes. And she did. And that is part of it. That's key. I was speaking the readers' language. I was writing what I liked to write and I decided to market it in a way like to market in, and then my readers love it. I'm really proud of what I did and that's all that really matters. Willow Winters, she was another author model.
She had these amazing blurbs. Oh my God. I loved these blurbs. I literally cut paste this into a file, and studied these blurbs, studied them. And then when I sat down to write a blurb, I would write a blurb like this. Now, if you go to my series, this is my point, these were my models, but when you look at my cover and you read my books, you are not going to think about Vanessa Vale's series. You're not really thinking about Madison Faye's covers or Willow Winters' blurbs. It is totally my brand. Totally. And I'm really proud of that. I'm so proud of what I've done. So I went in hard on this series. I had author models. I didn't plagiarize them, but I copied them. I stole their success. I said, I want covers like this. I want blurbs like this And I attracted a bunch of readers who loved the world. I gave him more of what they wanted.
What I liked about Lee’s comments is that you don’t have to construct your personal brand from a blank slate—you can model your brand presence on other authors who are achieving what you want to achieve and reaching the readers you want to reach. The best part about this advice is that it doesn’t have to be a cold-blooded mimicking of other’s work: Lee has made readers happy while pursuing her books and brand in a way she’s not just happy with, but proud of.
Pauline Wiles
Next we’re going to hear from Pauline Wiles. Pauline is a website designer who builds simple, stylish sites for authors and writers, helping to dispel some of the myths around how difficult – and costly – a web project should be. Pauline is yet another two-time guest:
Episode 027 - Why to Stop Blogging ... and What to Do Instead with Pauline Wiles
Episode 073 - Author Websites with Pauline Wiles
And as a website designer, it’s not surprising that Pauline has some great tips for the visual side of personal branding …
Hello Indy Author friends. I am Pauline Wiles. I am an author and website designer. Personal branding can seem like a bit of a mysterious and daunting topic. And if you're only just getting started with it, it can be pretty hard to know how to get your arms around it. Ideally, you will spend a lot of time thinking about your brand and how you want to show up in the world.
But if you need a quick route for getting going then as an author, my best advice to you is pay really careful attention to your book covers. Your book covers, of course, represent the type of writing you do, your genre, and should say something about how you want to come across to your readers. So in fact, these are all great ingredients for your personal brand. Make sure your book covers, if you have more than one book, , um, show some kind of consistency. So pay attention that the fonts and colors and overall , um, approach to your covers are in the same family, and you'll be off to a great start.
So my words of caution for you, be careful if you're using a low cost cover design service. Generally speaking, those folks don't have the time or the strategic input to really look after your brand as a whole. They're working very fast and you could end up with very different looking covers for each book.
And then also as a website designer, if an author comes to me with one book published and he or she says, I don't want my website to look like my book cover. My book cover isn't really how I want to come across on my website, then that really breaks my heart because there's clearly a disconnect there between the way the book is representing you and what you want your brand to be.
So if in doubt, keep an eye on your covers, they are a really strong representation of you. They're how you show up most often in front of your readers. And if you get those right to keep some consistency, then your personal brand will have a really strong foundation.
I’m a big fan of consistency in visual presentation … in fact, I thought I’d share an excerpt from my book THE INDY AUTHOR’S GUIDE TO PODCASTING FOR AUTHORS what addresses this:
The world’s most successful products have an immediately identifiable brand: the Starbucks’ siren, the Apple apple, the Nike swoosh. But as individuals, and especially as creatives, it’s sometimes hard to think about how to apply the concept of branding to our own work. Of course, the nautical world provides a metaphor: a ship’s livery.
In the cruise ship world, livery refers to the design and paint scheme used on the ship’s exterior, which often include variations on or references to the company’s logos and symbols. For example, Cunard ships are easily recognizable by their black hulls and red funnels, livery that has remained largely unchanged for almost 200 years. A glance across a busy harbor would confirm that you’re looking at a Cunard ocean liner, not a Celebrity or Royal Caribbean cruise ship, and the recognizable Cunard livery would telegraph a message about the experience you would expect aboard that ship.
Similarly, the “livery” of your podcast should telegraph the aspect of your podcast that sets it apart from others, and those characteristics will help listeners identify with you as an individual, not merely as an anonymous voice behind the microphone.
As many of you know, I share my podcast content in both audio and video, and some of the information I share about the livery of The Indy Author Podcast applies to my video presence: for example, having a pleasing background that subtly references the nautical metaphors I like to use for the writing craft and the publishing voyage, or wearing consistent and understated clothes and accessories so that the viewer’s attention is on my guest rather than on me.
Wade Walton
Wade Walton, who was one of my very first guests—in Episode 002 - Creativity Tips—is a television producer, as well as a photographer, writer, musician, and motivational trainer—and he has some tips to share about video and what it says about your personal brand.
Hi, this is Wade Walton with a comment on personal branding. Online, with so much of our lives spent in front of webcams, it's a terrific storytelling opportunity that can build rapport and help colleagues and friends understand you better. I'm a video producer and a musician who loves the outdoors, and I've reflected that in every aspect of my video space. My lighting and framing demonstrate my profession, while the scene is styled, simply with textiles and some of my musical equipment telling a simple but effective story of who I am. Spend some time thinking about your personal brand and how you can build it with your online scene.
So there you have it: “Perspectives on Personal Branding.” I’d summarize the perspectives of my guests by saying that personal branding encompasses three parties: yourself, the people you want to reach, and others who are reaching the people you want to reach in a way you want to reach them. You need to ensure that your personal brand is true to your own North Star and to your passion, you need to ensure it provides value to the people you want to reach, and you can look to the success of others for ways to develop your own unique personal brand.
Thanks again to Tiffany Yates Martin, Dale L. Roberts, Michael La Ronn, Joanna Penn, Robert Blake Whitehill, Lee Savino, Pauline Wiles, and Wade Walton for sharing their perspectives!
*****
I hope you enjoyed this “Perspectives on” episode. I’d love to hear any thoughts it triggered for you regarding personal branding, and any actions you plan to take as a result. Please also let me know if you liked the format—getting to hear many different perspectives on one topic—and, if you did, I’d love your suggestions for future “Perspectives on” topics!
Links
Episode 073 - Author Websites with Pauline Wiles
Episode 072 - Mentoring and Collaborating with Interns with Robert Blake Whitehill
Episode 065 - X-raying Your Plot with Tiffany Yates Martin
Episode 058 - Author Newsletters with Lee Savino
Build Your Bestselling Author Brand with Lee
Episode 055 - The Costs of Self-publishing a Book with Michael La Ronn
Episode 054 - Futurist Trends We Can Prepare for Now with Joanna Penn
Episode 053 - What Authors can Learn from TV and Movies with Tiffany Yates Martin
Episode 044 - Using Aggregators versus Going Direct with Dale L. Roberts
Episode 034 - Connecting through Video with Dale L. Roberts
How To Build Your Brand Identity from Scratch on Self Publishing with Dale
Episode 027 - Why to Stop Blogging ... and What to Do Instead with Pauline Wiles
Episode 008 - Screenwriting with Robert Blake Whitehill
Episode 002 - Creativity Tips with Wade Walton
Episode 072 - Mentoring and Collaborating with Interns with Robert Blake Whitehill
Episode 065 - X-raying Your Plot with Tiffany Yates Martin
Episode 058 - Author Newsletters with Lee Savino
Build Your Bestselling Author Brand with Lee
Episode 055 - The Costs of Self-publishing a Book with Michael La Ronn
Episode 054 - Futurist Trends We Can Prepare for Now with Joanna Penn
Episode 053 - What Authors can Learn from TV and Movies with Tiffany Yates Martin
Episode 044 - Using Aggregators versus Going Direct with Dale L. Roberts
Episode 034 - Connecting through Video with Dale L. Roberts
How To Build Your Brand Identity from Scratch on Self Publishing with Dale
Episode 027 - Why to Stop Blogging ... and What to Do Instead with Pauline Wiles
Episode 008 - Screenwriting with Robert Blake Whitehill
Episode 002 - Creativity Tips with Wade Walton
What did you think of this episode? Leave a comment and let us know!
