How to Create an Author Brand by Tori Scott, Author of Four Houses

Before my career in writing began, I studied and worked for several years in media and marketing. I received a bachelor’s degree in marketing from Texas A&M University, and later, a master’s degree in marketing from the University of North Texas. I then went on to work in marketing for some of the nation’s largest newspapers and radio stations. These experiences have helped me understand the power of branding: not only your work, but yourself as a writer. Today, I thought I’d share four tips on how to maximize and clearly define your brand in the marketplace:

TIP #1
Understand your demographic – Your demographic is the segment of the population you’re trying to reach (ex. Males, ages 18-34). It’s tempting to shoot for everyone, but this is almost never effective. If you decide to write for young adults, do your best to stick with it. This doesn’t mean you can’t ever cross over, but be aware that it will take time, money, and effort to do so. With large brands, alienating your original demographic is a real threat when trying to reach for new demographics (ex. alienating your YA readers by writing a book on child care for men, ages 25-34). So choose carefully, and stick with your original demographic for the long haul if at all possible.

TIP #2

Don’t clutter your brand – Your brand should be crystal clear. McDonalds is a place to eat hamburgers. Wal-Mart is a place to buy cheap merchandise. If you’re a writer, be a writer. Make sure your profile or bio doesn’t say you’re a “cat groomer, water taffy enthusiast, and writer.” This is an example of a cluttered brand. If you have numerous interests, create multiple accounts with different profile pictures, different web addresses, etc. Otherwise, readers aren’t sure they’ve found who they’re looking for. Here’s an example of a clear Twitter profile: I’m a fiction writer, and author of the book, CATS IN STARLAND. I’m also a member of the Boston Writing League and Girls with Pens. Find me online at: www.JaneDoe.com. Think of your bio and profiles as mini resumes—would you put “cat enthusiast” on a writing resume sent to The New York Times?

TIP #3

YOU are the brand – Readers want to know about two things: you and your books. “You” doesn’t mean news about your husband/wife/child/pet koala. This is another case where writers should be careful to avoid including information about their families in their profiles. Also, don’t include family members in your profile pictures or bio pictures (unless it’s for a family-oriented book). Ask yourself: would you bring news or a photo of a child, spouse, or pet to a writing job interview?

TIP #4

Create a clear message – This goes back to “don’t clutter your brand.” Remember with every message you send, that you are a professional. So for example, on Twitter avoid sending messages that “you just got done washing your dog.” This doesn’t have anything to do with your career, and other authors/editors/agents/readers will stop following you if you do this too often. A little personal information is okay, but I’d try to make 95% of your posts and tweets related to writing and reading.

TIP #5

Integrate your brand – Integrating means creating a uniform message. For example, Southwest Airlines will run the exact same message in radio/print/TV/online. They do this because, statistically, you’re more likely to remember a message if you see it multiple times the exact same way (hence big brands running the same exact commercial enough times to make your scream). What does this mean for you? At the very least, use the same exact images on your website, Facebook account, Twitter account, etc. What you’re going for is uniformity. This is why brands create logos, so they can place it on everything they create.

I hope this helped! I know marketing can be the boring, brutal part of being a writer. But with a little time and creativity, you can build your brand and ultimately gain clear, uniform exposure to agents, editors, and readers. Thanks for reading! Keep writing! :)

Thanks Tori for stopping by YA Bound! This is a wonderful post and I've learned so much. 

You can find my review of FOUR HOUSES here at YA Bound. And, starting July first, you can receive a FREE copy of Tori's story! Check out Tori's website for information on where to get your very own copy here.

What do those numbers mean?! Amazon's Bestseller Ranking System

Okay, so I’ve been trying to understand the Amazon Bestseller Ranking system for some time. I’ve read their description “The Sales Ranking system exhibits how books are selling. The lower the number, the higher the sales. The calculation is based on sales and is updated each hour to reflect recent and historical sales of every item sold. We hope you find the Amazon.com Sales Rank interesting!” O_o

Makes absolutely no sense to me. And what is up with that interesting part? Anyway, on my searches, I’ve discovered probably the best piece of information to clarify, at least, what the numbers mean. Granted, there are many sites and blogs that dispute even this:

'If the book’s average ranking is: 2,000,000-plus, then perhaps a single inventory/consignment copy has been ordered.
1,000,000-plus, the current trends indicate total sales will most likely be under 40.
100,000-plus, then current trends indicate total sales will most likely be under 200.
10,000-plus, you can estimate between 1 – 10 copies are being sold per week.
1,000-plus, you can estimate between 10 – 100 copies are being sold per week.
100-plus, you can estimate between 100 – 200 copies are being sold per week.
10-plus, you can estimate between 200 – 1000 copies are being sold per week.
In the top 10, you can estimate over 1,000 copies are per week'

(Taken from Author Insider by Brent Sampson)

That pretty much shows you sales overall. It’s vague, but helpful. Though I’m not sure it breaks down to how well a book is selling daily. So I also found this little nugget of information:

'80,000 that means 1 sale today (within the last couple of hours)
40,000 = 2 sales today
20,000 = 4 sales today
10,000 = 8 sales today
and so on.'

(Taken from Nimble Books LLC)

The last numbers are from a publisher that watches the sales of his authors daily. I think both sets of numbers resemble each other, and pretty much you can see how well a book is selling just by adding up the zeros. All the other information I’ve gathered up just confused me. I’m no math expert. I don’t understand algorithms, and honestly, I don’t want to. I'm a writer for God's sake. Math just causes my head to hurt and the lights to flicker. For whatever reason I hope this helps. I felt baffled, so I wanted to share some findings.

If you have an easier or more precise breakdown, please share!

Abbi Glines, Author of BREATHE, Talks About Inspiration

The one question I get asked the most is, “where do you get your ideas from?” It never fails to be followed up by, “let me tell you about my ‘Uncle Vern’ or ‘Grandma Bertha’ (etc) they would be great story materiel!” I’ve heard more stories about people’s crazy relatives than any one human should have to suffer through. Southerners seem to think their dysfunctional family is the stuff of bestsellers.

Honestly, I’ve never used any of the ideas so “helpfully” thrown at me. Story ideas hit me out of the blue and I grab anything lying around and start writing my sudden inspiration down on it. When I say anything...I mean anything. Once I grabbed my kid’s sock out of the floorboard of the car and the red marker in my six year old daughter’s hand in order to scribble my idea down while at a stoplight.

The moment the idea for my debut novel Breathe hit me, I was sprawled out in the front of a friends boat cruising the gulf waters along Ono Island. I always enjoy looking at the massive building these people called houses on this private Island. Several are owned by famous people. I basically live in Orange Beach, AL during the summers and I have never seen the celebrities that own the mansions on the water of the private island. Anyway, that day I started thinking “what if...”

What if a famous teen music sensation (my daughter was blaring Justin Bieber on the radio at the moment) had a summer getaway on the island?

What if a small town southern girl was somehow thrown into his path?

What if......

That afternoon Breathe was born. I grabbed a paper towel and a black Sharpie and began writing. Before the afternoon was over Jax Stone and Sadie White had been created in the land of fiction. It took me over a month to finish the first draft. We won’t talk about how many more drafts I went through after the first one...or the editing and editing and editing I also had to do in order to get it perfect.

My next YA novel, Existence, will be released sometime in 2012, I think. Not sure on the release date yet. The idea for Existence is slightly sordid. Maybe I’ll get around to sharing that in another blog someday. Currently I am writing my third YA novel. I’ll only tell you this much. My best friend was born and raised in Louisiana. Thanks to her roots I have been rather curious about cajuns...and Voodoo.


Read an excerpt from Breathe here

You can follow Abbi on Twitter @AbbiGlines and her blog www.AbbiGlines.com

Kindle Edition

Published May 16th 2011 by Wild Child Publishing

Buy From Amazon Here
 
From Goodreads: Sadie White's summer job isn't going to be on the beach life-guarding or working at rental booths like most kids her age. With her single mother's increasing pregnancy and refusal to work, Sadie has to take over her mother's job as a domestic servant for one of the wealthy summer families on a nearby island.

When the family arrives at their summer getaway, Sadie is surprised to learn that the owner of the house is Jax Stone, one of the hottest teen rockers in the world. If Sadie hadn't spent her life raising her mother and taking care of the house she might have been normal enough to be excited about working for a rock star.

Even though Sadie isn't impressed by Jax's fame, he is drawn to her. Everything about Sadie fascinates Jax but he fights his attraction. Relationship's never work in his world and as badly as he wants Sadie, he believes she deserves more. By the end of the summer, Jax discovers he can't breathe without Sadie.

But can their love overcome the disparity in their lifestyles? Or will they have to learn how to without each other breathe again?

Not again! Easy ways to remove Trojans and Malware from your computer and save your files

You know what I see a lot of? Viruses. Writers live on their computers. Granted I’m always doing very important things. (Stares at Twitter feed). And yesterday I got yet another virus after minding my own business and not going to the ‘bad’ websites =/ I hate losing my files. I hate when that stupid antivirus screen pops up right in the middle of writing the best SCENE IN THE WORLD and I didn’t get to save it or back it up. So. . . I figured I could do a really cool post today that would blow your mind, or, I could tackle something that all writers, people, whoever deal with, and possibly give some helpful advice. Because I battle these lil demons so much, I’ve picked up a few tricks on getting rid of them that you won’t find if you try to Google.

What you need to do right now. Go get yourself a free program call Malwarebytes. They update their site all the time and that means your program is updated all the time with the current nasties lurking out there. Scan your PC once a week. This will keep it pretty clean.

Second, buy a USB flashdrive. Backup all your important files daily. Or, at the very least, weekly. You also want to create a restore point weekly. Simply click start then rest you curser over Computer and right click. Select Properties. Choose System Protection. Then click the button at the bottom ‘Create’. This will walk you through setting up a restore point for your computer. It’s pretty basic.

Next, say you’re just chilling and all of a sudden BAM you get a pop up and it says you’re infected. Or, your screen locks up, or, you can’t perform any function. Whatever type of virus you encounter, if you can quickly press and hold down your power button, turning your PC off, that will stop the virus from spreading. I know, you didn’t save that final copy. You don’t want to restart your computer until you’ve backed it up. Forget it. It’s toast anyway if you don’t stop that virus from spreading. Just power down.

After your screen is dark, hit power and quickly tap and keep tapping the F8 key. A black screen will pop up with three options. Press your down key and click Start in Safe Mode. Do not start in safe mode with networking. The virus is connected to the Internet. You want to quarantine it and keep it from transferring anymore of your info. Once you’re booted up in safe mode and your desktop pops up, hopefully the virus won’t start running again and you can do a system restore. Simply click on Start and type ‘restore’. Then choose System Restore. Click next in the box and choose the most recent date before you got the virus. Then restart your computer. That’s the easy way. That takes care of most malware. And you can run Malwarebytes to make sure it’s gone.

Now, say you’ve gotten a Trojan. Those are really, really tricky. You’ve booted up into Safe Mode but every time you try to run System Restore it gives you an error message. You try to run your antivirus software but it won’t load. Crap. You’re screwed. No, you’re just a little screwed. Click Start then Control Panel. Then select Add User Account. Make a new user account and set it as an administrator. Click Start and select ‘switch user’. This partitions your hard drive and quarantines the Trojan on the other user account. Most of your programs will be assessable from your new user account. And most importantly, Malwarebytes. Open Malwarebytes and perform a full scan. After about 30 minutes, it should locate the nasties and will give you an option to remove them. Do this.

Switch back over to your main user account. The virus is gone. If all went well and you shut down your computer quickly, all your files should be okay. If you’re like me and seem to always get the shaft, it’s possible a lot of your files became corrupt and you can no longer open them along with most of you programs. Unfortunately, there’s no way to salvage a corrupt file. But, you kept that back up on your flashdrive, right? Simply chose the new user account and download all your saved files there. All your programs will be there and virus free; though you may have to go to settings in each program and set new paths for where certain programs download new files onto the new user account. You can Google how to do this. But the important thing is, the Trojan is off your hard drive and you don’t have to wipe your computer and take it down to factory settings, which saves those programs you downloaded from the web or don’t have backups for.

After you’ve reinstalled all your files and set your program paths to your new user account, repeat the second step from above and create a new restore point. Hope this helps. At least it saves most of your crucial programs and files.