You finished your book, now you have figure out how to market it. That’s sometimes the hardest part.

This is where you should start thinking about your brand.

• What matters to you?
• What genres are you most interested?
• How do you want to talk about your work?

These are questions to think about. Building your brand is about thinking about who you are and what you’re trying to say. This is going to inform your social media posts, the videos you create on TikTok, and the way you speak about yourself at events.

Think about your message. Your brand is your thing. It tells people who you are, it evokes a feeling in them. Your brand is what they’re going to connect to. Your brand is something they can feel tied back to.

You’ve finished that book. Now what? Now think about the genre you just wrote. Go deeper. Let’s say you just wrote a love story. How does that work with your brand? How are you going to talk about the book? Does this mean your posts are going to speak to the kind of writer you are? When you think about what you just wrote, what comes to mind?

Your brand is a look, a feel; something that makes people want to be part of your community. A fantasy writer’s brand may be fun, dark, mysterious. A romance writer’s brand may be seductive and sexy. A thriller writer may want their blog posts, photos, and visuals all to speak to the thrillers they create.

When people go to your site, what do they see? When they go to your social, is there a color at play? When they hear from you via email, what kind of language are you using? All these things tie into your brand and what kind of feeling you’re trying to impart to readers.