Become an author to build your personal brand

Always thought of being an author one day but can’t write a book?

I’ve been talking recently about how to set up your personal brand and how to establish your personal brand and get your name out there.

One of the ways you can establish a personal brand is being an author and writing a book. That may seem really scary and some people think there is no way they can a page let alone a book.

Why write a book?

Think about it. When you see anybody that has written a book, you tend to see them as more as an authority, more trustworthy.

(Author is the root of the word Authority.) They become elevated in your perception of them. So that’s really why you want to write a book – to establish your personal brand and get that perception of you elevated.

I’m just about to publish one of my books, 11 Reasons Why Your Business Isn’t Growing and we’re just in the final stages of getting this prepared ready for print.

I’m really excited to get this going, so hopefully you will be in my place very soon where you’ll have a book in your hands.

Where to start?

First break down your book into main chapters then brainstorm the content you could write about on each chapter. Then break each of those individual pieces to brainstorm the details of each section.

What I did in my book was identify 11 mistakes I’ve seen business owners I’ve met over 20 years in business and these became my main chapters. Then I identified the details of each point and came up with solutions – how I could teach prospective readers what to do to rectify or avoid these mistakes.

Once you’ve done the planning and devised an intro and a conclusion, you have the elements of your book. You are on your way to being an author!

It’s just 11 essays really

If writing a book overwhelms you, think of each chapter as an essay like the ones you used to write at school. You just need to write 11 essays, or however many chapters are in your book. Now if you don’t want to write the chapters yourself, you can outsource the writing to a professional. Or you could create a book that comprises different stories from others and in exchange for featuring them in your book, ask each person featured to write their chapter. Then you just need to get someone to edit it. Another way to make it easy is for you to dictate the book into a transcribing app. These are highly accurate today and you’ll have your book out of your head and onto paper in the time it tales to dictate it!

It doesn’t have to be long

Another myth is that a book has to be really long. Well, it doesn’t really. Being an author isn’t dependent on the length of the book. It can be as long as you need it to be. So if the reason for writing a book is really just for publicity and to elevate your perception of people’s perception of you, you could just do a short little ebook and put that out and that’s enough.

PLR

Another approach to consider is to buy a license to put your name on someone else’s book. This is called public license rights. To find books you can buy a license for, do an online search around your topic and add “PLR” to the end of your search. You’ll find some websites selling content that you can use without changing and that you can just put your name to. Or you can edit as you see fit and use the book as a base. Just be careful to read and understand the license rights you are purchasing so you know what you can and can’t do with the content.

By implementing any of these ideas, you can have a book out to elevate your brand quite quickly without having to deal with the overwhelm.