Every writer’s conference or gathering includes at least one presentation about developing or maintaining an author-marketing platform.

Social Media, public speaking, blogging, newsletters…everything working together to establish and support your personalized and unique author “brand.” This agency and other publishing blogs address various elements of the issue on a regular basis.

If you are having difficulty determining the direction of your author brand, you might either be thinking incorrectly about it or avoiding the obvious.

Life hands you a platform.

Often, creative people avoid the obvious and desire instead to go an entirely different direction than their experience would indicate. A simple desire to be creative can do this.  Narrowing one’s work to one general theme seems restrictive and even creatively dissatisfying.

Re-stating what has been said here and by many others, successful authors will primarily find their success by doing one type of writing…their one thing.  A significant majority of authors will write and publish less than a half-dozen books in their lifetime, so unless you are extremely successful, you have just a few opportunities to speak into your brand.

You can become so worried about being repetitive in your fourth and fifth books, you might not have a second or third.

Life gives you a platform, meaning if you look at your experiences, journey, friends, family, work, education, challenges, successes, failures, strengths, talents, weaknesses, spiritual gifts, and sins (yes, sins), you will find a core message laying there which should drive your entire writing career, no matter how many books you might write.

The mistake most writers make is thinking their brand must be so specific and narrow the joy of writing would be completely eliminated because you need to write the same book over and over.

Not true.

Branding is not limiting, it is liberating.

A brand does not repeat the same story, but the same underlying theme.  You might think life gave you just one story, but it really gave you a broader message. This broader message is what any skilled author can write about.

Companies and organizations have mission-statements or guiding principles to direct them. Authors should as well. This is the “message platform” which will form a foundation for your writing. (For more on a message platform, click here)

You don’t write Christian fiction, you write stories about people living life in relationships and how God directs them.

You don’t write devotionals or Bible studies, you focus a reader’s thoughts on the things of God and what he desires a person to know about him.

You don’t write books about effective use of money, you show how God’s principles of stewardship make the things of this world work for one’s benefit and for God’s purposes.

The “big” messages from Scripture are themes, which can be repeated and re-purposed in many books. These messages can make for elements of an excellent author mission statement and branded theme behind their writing.

God’s faithfulness

God’s limitless mercy and grace

God working everything together for good

Forgiveness and Restoration

Redeeming your past

…and many more.

Most authors who resist the idea of branding their work do so because they mistakenly establish a brand, which is too specific, missing the bigger theme, which could find its way into many books.

Finding the big-message brand for your writing should be relatively simple, if you are only open to seeing it. Your life and faith journey hand it to you on a silver platform.