Promoting Your Brand

Yes, your brand! You might say, I'm an author, I don't have a brand. But that's not true, because you do have one! Your brand is...drum roll, please, YOU!

So, it's important to realize that, as you're trying to promote your brand, you are, first and foremost, promoting yourself. This is something that I have a really difficult time with, as I've never been a good salesperson. I worked at Auto Zone for a year, but that's not really the same thing as being a salesperson; after all, ANY customer that walks through the door needs something that we have! And I've always had trouble with, say embellishing a resume, for example. I don't quite have the self-confidence that I need to be able to effectively sell myself.

But I feel like I am making strides in the right direction. I purchased and copyrighted my butterfly logo when I "founded" my publishing company, Metamorph Publishing. At the moment, Metamorph's only author is myself, but both of my daughters are also writers, and you never know what the future may hold. I paid $10, I think, for the simple butterfly clip art. I added my own text to it, and it's become my company logo! Truthfully, I've fallen in love with it for its simplicity.

So in an attempt to spread that "brand", I've been using this logo for all social media "avatars" that I use for my business. It's also on my website, and you can see it's here as well. I'm also trying to integrate it into the email signature of my "business" email, and in as many other places as I can think, like my About.me page.

Why is this important? Well, according to Mark Coker of Smashwords, one of our marketing goals should be to get our links (to books, website, author page, etc.) in as many different places as we can. Doing this changes our positioning in the search engine algorithm when people do a simple search online. The more times our links show up, and in the more places, the higher we will get in the search engine's results. I don't understand much about how this all works, but Mark explained it pretty nicely for someone as non-tech savvy as myself.

Taking that a step farther is what I'm doing with my publishing logo. It's on my blog, my website, my Facebook page, my Amazon page, my About.me, LinkedIn, and so on. I'm even printing it on the new cover of Once Upon a Western Way, and considering printing it on the bottom of my copyright pages. Not sure how well it will turn out in the digital versions, but it should look nice in the print format.

I think the longer my butterfly brand is out there, the more people I will get to follow me. Once this brand is established, especially if I continue to strive to put out quality books (new and revised older ones), I think it will continue to attract more and more people.