Tuesday, January 14, 2014

What's Your Brand Statement?

As authors, we’re always trying to promote ourselves and do what we can to put our works in front of a new group of readers.

The problem is a lot of authors take the shotgun approach. They blast their message out there to everyone hoping a few people will act on it. It’s possible one or two people will take a peek and maybe even drop $2.99 to buy your work, but odds are it’s going to miss its mark with most of the people you broadcast your message to.

The thing is you’re casting too wide of a net. When you target everyone, you’re likely to miss the folks who would be most interested in purchasing your book.

What you need to do is develop a brand statement. You should be able, to sum up what you’re all about in one sentence.

In my case, I write short easy to implement solutions designed to help my readers with e-commerce problems related to selling online – specifically on eBay, Amazon, Etsy, and Fiverr. That’s a good start at my brand statement. Overtime I've narrowed it down even further. I wanted to make it as easy as possible for readers to understand what I’m all about.



Here’s what I finally came up with –

Short easy to read solutions to your e-commerce problems.

That’s my entire brand statement. Nine easy words tell readers all they need to know to decide if I’m the guy they're looking for or not.

How about you? Can you sum up your brand in less than ten words? If not you need to take a really good look at what you’re doing, because if you can’t easily define yourself, neither can the potential readers you’re trying to reach.

Defining your brand this way is going to do one other thing for your writing. It’s going to help you focus on what’s important to your readers. In my case, each of my books needs to be short, easy to understand and focus on solving one particular e-commerce problem. If each book does that I fulfill the promise I made to my readers.

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My brand statement is the opening line to my author biography for most of my e-commerce books. After it, I add a sentence or two to fill it out so readers can get a little better idea of what my books are all about.

Here’s the long version.

Short easy to read solutions to your ecommerce problems.


Most of my books can be read in under an hour. The information in them can be put to work immediately to help you sell more products on eBay and Amazon, services on Fiverr, or eBooks and books an Amazon and Kindle.

Let me ask you again. What is your short and long brand statement?


6 comments:

  1. Visiting by way of IU Blogfest. Very nice blog, Nik! As a newbie author, I am still working on my "brand" ... will have to get back to you on that.

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    1. Thanks for stopping by. As a new author the best advice I can give you is to read everything you can find on Indie publishing; pick out several ideas you like and give them a whirl. Keep moving forward with the ideas that work, disgard the others.

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  2. Hi from the IU blog fest!

    Hmm.... My brand statement is along the lines of, "Former broadcast journalist, now writing urban fantasy novels." The long statement is -- as you say -- what I put in my author bio. :)

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    1. Hi Lynne - Not as easy as it looks is it? I've reworked my brand statement several times over the last few years, and as I charge ahead with Indie Authors Toolbox I'm in for another rewrite.Change is good, right?

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  3. Stopping by on Blog hop - wishing you the best. Interesting post regarding brand statements. Currently I am taking a class on Content Strategy and finding a brand's voice can be complicated. I like yours and think it will work well for you. Wishing you the best.

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    1. Thanks Elizabeth - Content writing is a whole other animal all together. It's the direction the internet, advertising, and publishing is moving towards. That's probably a good thing because it forces everyone to publish quality useful info, rather that a bunch of articles stuffed full of keywords to try and get the attention of search engines and bots.

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