Hi friend, and welcome back to The Author’s Guide to Simple Marketing!

Let’s get something out of the way, because I can already feel you tensing up at the words “personal brand.”

If you’re thinking color palettes, a logo, matching fonts, a generic content strategy, a curated aesthetic personality you have to maintain forever or “I just want to write books, not become an influencer” — good news.

That’s not what this is.

You do not need to become a walking mood board.

You do not need to wake up tomorrow as “cozy dark academia author girl” and start arranging candles around your laptop like a small literary séance.

Unless you want to, obviously. I support harmless candle crimes.

A personal brand is not a fake online persona. It’s not beige graphics and a three-colour scheme. It’s not posting your face every day or pretending to be more polished than you are. Let me tell you what it actually is, because when it clicks, it changes how you think about your marketing.

So, what really is a personal brand?

In short: a personal brand is the pattern people start to recognize in you.

It’s the impression someone is left with after they’ve encountered your work a few times, how they’d describe you to a friend.

It’s your reputation.

And for us as authors, it’s the answer to a very important question: why should someone follow you or me, and not the thousand other authors posting about writing this week?

The reason, my friend, is YOU.

Your world is built from your voice, your values, your taste, your opinions, the themes you keep circling back to, your sense of humor and the emotional territory you live in. It’s the promises readers start to associate with your name.

Which means there is no “one size fits all.”

For one author it might be: she writes messy women, morally grey men, coastal towns, and romance that feels like coming home.

For another, it might be: he writes epic fantasy that takes you on a journey you’ll never forget with characters so flawed they feel like real human beings, real people I know.

And for another it could be: she’s the one who talks honestly about writing slowly, building stories with actual depth, and handling the publishing industry without losing your mind.

And THAT is a personal brand.

The most important ingredient in all of it is your voice — I can’t stress that enough — because everything else can be borrowed or copied by someone else. You’re not alone in your opinions, your humor isn’t unique. But your voice is. It’s the one thing that’s genuinely, unrepeatably yours.

Okay, let’s make this less floaty with some examples!

Weak book-only branding sounds like: “I write romance.”

Better book branding sounds like: “I write slow-burn coastal romance with found family, healing after chaos, complicated pasts, and men who seem emotionally stable before disappointing everyone.”

Weak author branding sounds like: “I’m an author.”

Better author branding sounds like: “I write emotionally intense love stories about messy people learning how to feel safe, and I talk honestly about writing, ambition, motherhood, and trying to build an author career without turning into a content goblin.”

And the same goes with fantasy!

Weak: “I write fantasy.”

Better: “I write political fantasy with monsters, oppression, slow-burn tension, morally complicated characters, and people who can’t decide if they should kiss, lie, or overthrow the government.”

You can feel that difference, right?

The weak versions are technically true, but they don’t give anyone anything to remember. The stronger versions have shape. Taste. Specificity.

That’s what we’re looking for.

So, what is NOT a personal brand?

Before we get into how we can build one if you’re still on the fence, let me put your mind at ease.

A personal brand is not inventing a fake personality, and it’s not sharing every private detail of your life. You are not an “influencer”.

We’re not building this so people can consume our lives. We’re building it so they understand why we’re worth paying attention to. And that’s a lot more genuine and fun for us to build and grow with as our careers evolve.

A personal brand sells without constantly selling

This is the part that matters for your book sales.

And no, having a personal brand does not mean you never have to promote your book. I wish. Truly. I’d love to tell you that being charming online means the ‘buy’ links magically float into readers’ hands while we sit in a pretty chair and drink tea.

Sadly, no.

But with a strong personal brand, your book will no longer show up like cold dry pasta.

The truth is that a reader is unlikely to buy because they scrolled by a post telling them to. But after seeing you talk about the same kinds of stories, themes, struggles, opinions, books, characters, reader experiences, and writing process for months? Your name holds weight.

They start to trust that if you write a book, there is probably a reason they might want it.

And that is how personal branding sells without constantly selling. It warms your audience up before you ever make the offer. It turns your cold dry pasta dish into a steaming, rich, creamy Carbonara.

Because here’s the alternative. When you build your marketing around your book, the book is the whole identity. Which means it does all the relationship-building. That can work for a while, especially inside a series, but it becomes harder the moment you write something new.

Every time you do, you have to convince them, again, to read your book because your readers have to ask the same questions all over again — who was this author again? Do people I trust like their books? Do I trust them to take me on a journey worth my time? Do I want what they’re selling?

But when you build it around you, they come for everything you make. They’re not here for one book, instead they’re here for the whole universe that is you.

This is why some authors hit bestseller lists the moment they release something new, yes, even a debut. It’s not luck. They built a world around themselves and readers show up because they love to spend time in it.

Think about that for a second.

I mean, there’s a reason people lose their minds every time Sarah J. Maas announces a new book, even years after her last. Elsie Silver literally calls her books the Silververse — a play on “universe” — and readers dive back in every single release. Victoria Aveyard, Colleen Hoover, Brandon Sanderson — all masters of this. People don’t come back for one book. They come back for them.

That’s what we’re building. In our own way because we are not trying to copy the scale of those brands (unless that’s what you want), but we look at them as clear examples of the branding principles built around a person.

Which leads us onto how to differentiate between a book brand and an author brand!

This distinction is key, especially if you write more than one series or across genres.

A book brand is the specific promise of one book or series. Like, slow-burn coastal romance, found family, healing after chaos. It answers the question: what is this book/series?

An author brand is the broader promise across everything you write. Emotionally intense love stories about broken people finding safety, atmospheric settings, complicated pasts, characters who desperately want to be loved and are very annoying about accepting it no matter if it’s contemporary, fantasy or gothic. This answers a different question: why should I keep paying attention to you?

Your book brand sells one book or series. Your author brand sells all of them, including the ones you haven’t written yet. That’s why we don’t tie our whole identity to a single title.

A word on faceless accounts

Before we get practical, a word on the faceless accounts, because I know many authors are running one and hoping to build a brand without ever showing up as a face.

And the main question is, can you build a personal brand with one?

Read more

Hi friend, and welcome back to The Author’s Guide to Simple Marketing!

Quick question before we get into it — when did you last check your Substack email settings?

If the answer is “I set them up when I joined and haven’t thought about them since” or worse, “I didn’t know there were email settings” — this episode is going to make your day. Because setting them up the way I’m going to show you is one of the highest value things you can do on Substack.

We’re talking about your automated emails.

The ones that go out automatically when someone subscribes, upgrades to paid, or when their subscription is about to renew or expire. Most writers either leave these blank entirely — which means Substack sends a generic default that’s even worse than nothing — or fill them in rather hastily and never update them to convert.

And that, my friend, is a missed opportunity of the highest order.

Because here’s the thing about automated emails: you write them once, and they work forever. Every single new subscriber gets them. Every person who upgrades to paid gets them. Every renewal, every expiry — covered, handled, done.
That’s marketing running in the background of your life while you’re doing literally anything else. Writing, sleeping, spending time with your family, staring blankly into your coffee.

BUT the results depend on how you write the emails.

So that’s exactly what we’re doing today. We’re setting up your emails so you can sell more books now and in the future. And to make it simple — since that’s my whole thing — I’m sharing what each email needs to do, the entire setup from start to finish, and even giving you specific lines you can adapt in a jiff.

If you fall into the category that hasn’t set these emails up or hasn’t optimized them yet, no worries. There is no shame or blame here, life happens, and we learn as we go along. Even I just got around to doing it recently, and I know better than to skip it.

It’s never too late to set it up, so let’s get you started ASAP!

If you are currently using an external email platform, you can find inspiration for what to write in your emails, but this is primarily for Substack emails. There will be a full episode showing you how to set up your automated emails as well, so stick around.

Read more

Hi friend, and welcome back to episode 6 of The Author’s Guide to Simple Marketing!

You know what the annoying thing about marketing is?

It’s that you can be working really hard with your marketing…

Posting consistently
Sharing updates
Talking about your book
Trying to show up even when you would rather be writing, reading, or staring dramatically out of a window

And still, something about it just doesn’t work.

It’s not because you’re bad at marketing. It’s not because your book isn’t interesting. It’s not because you have to become a whole new person online.

No, it’s the tiny mistakes that weaken the relationship between you and your reader.

I’ve seen the same mistakes come up over and over. And frustratingly enough, they all have a simple fix once you know what to look for.

So in this episode, we’re going through the 6 most common marketing mistakes I see writers make, and more importantly, what to do instead. Because knowing the mistake is only half of it. I want you to be able to actually fix it!

Okay, let’s jump right in!

Building relationships is the core of marketing

The time when marketing was just a one-way conversation for businesses to gain attention is over. And thankfully so, because building a real relationship is both more authentic and more meaningful.

What we need to understand is that gaining followers doesn’t mean building a community. That having followers doesn’t mean we’ll get likes and comments. And it doesn’t mean we’ll sell books.

Because a following is not anything of value, if all it is is just… well, followers. They can see our posts and forget about us in an instant.

What we want to build is a community.

You’ve probably heard that term hundreds of times, but without substance, so it probably doesn’t mean a lot. So let me say it in other words:

A group of people who are like-minded, and we have built a relationship with.

That makes more sense, right?

Because that is the whole premise of marketing. Growing a tribe of people we like to hang out with, who remember us, who care about our writing journey, and are excited about our books.

This is the purpose we lead everything back to when we pick and choose the strategies that make up our marketing effort.

Which leads us to the mistakes, because you’ll notice they’re all things that in one way or another break the chain of building that deep relationship with your followers that is so crucial if it’s supposed to grow into a community.

Mistake #1: Not replying to every comment

We’re starting off with something that feels easy but has a huge impact–replying to comments. This is the first point of building a relationship with your followers. You post something -> they answer with a comment -> you reply = one stone placed on the road of your relationship.

What happens when we don’t reply is that the commentator feels rejected. They made an effort, they gave us a piece of their energy, their time, and got nothing back. I don’t need to tell you that’s bad for building relationships.

The rule is to always reply to every comment!

Why would anybody continue engaging, replying, and talking to us if we don’t talk back? Nobody is interested in listening to us send out a message like a radio; they want conversations. They want their voice heard, and not in two days. Today.

Simply liking it does not count. If the conversation is over? If you’ve had a rude reply? If the comment consists of only one emoji? Yes, go ahead and give it a like. Otherwise, reply.

Steps of action:

• Set a rule to always reply to every comment you get

• Depending on how many comments you get, take 5-15 minutes once or twice a day to reply

Side note! If you get a lot of comments, replying to every one can become an enormous task. We should still try our best, but sometimes comments will slip through, and that’s ok. Prioritize the genuine ones, those with questions and conversation starters.

Read more

Hi friend, and welcome back to The Author’s Guide to Simple Marketing! I’m so excited about today’s episode because I know how much you’ve looked forward to this. Not only that, but it solves one of the most common problems for authors:

“What do I even post?”

Somehow the same brain that can build an entire fictional world can sit down in front of a blank screen and immediately forget every idea you had in the shower, every thought you had while walking, and every interesting thing that happened this week. Leaving you staring at a blank screen wondering if you’ve ever had a single interesting thought in your life.

Today we’re fixing that!

I’m going to show you my entire content idea system—an endless idea machine that ensures I never ever run out of content. And the best part? It’s simple!

This is not one of those “best content strategies” that require a three-hour Notion setup. Or a “you have to have XYZ” where you have to pay for two platforms and a template. Or a “40 spreadsheets of ideas for everyone” that are only generic crap you won’t actually use. Because screw difficult systems we barely understand.

So today we’re building you a system so foolproof you’ll have more ideas than you have time to post, a way to turn one idea into several, AND a method for squeezing more content out of what you’ve already made.

Let’s go!

The real problem is not what you think

Before we get into the actual system, we need to understand the root of most content struggles and how most authors go about creating content the wrong way.

Most of us sit down when it’s time to post, or wait for a perfect piece of content to pop up so we can post when we have ideas. This causes two problems: bad content and zero consistency.

What we should do is build a whole bank of content ideas saved and waiting for when it’s time to post.

Because we freeze up when we sit down to create content is not that we have nothing interesting to say. It’s that we’re asking our brains to be creative on demand, and guess what an instant creativity killer is? Yup, pressure.

In an instant our brains forget that we have years of experiences, opinions, and observations that could become great content, and instead we just sit there going “uhhhh.”

This is why the recommendation to solve it by trying harder won’t change anything. The real solution is so much simpler: don’t get there in the first place.

And THAT is exactly what this system is designed to do.

Instead of chasing after the content ideas, we let them come to us and save them in a content bank. Which is crucial if we want big results, because the truth is:

More content gives you more chances to be remembered!

More content means more visibility, more connection, more readers finding you, more books sold. That is the reality of how content works.

BUT before moving on, I have to say that posting MORE doesn’t solve your problem. It’s not about ‘more’. It’s about the right content.

There are nuances to this, and we’re going to get into that in future episodes, but worth mentioning is that WHAT you post matters most. The wrong content will punch you in the throat. Hard. And it won’t matter if you post every day.

Today though, we’ll stay on the topic of how to come up with it.

More GOOD content, better results. But we’re going to work smarter, not harder, because that’s what we’re here for. Right?

Steal my content idea system

OKAY, friend, we’re at the good part—the idea system!

It is split up into four parts:

• Notice

• Capture

• Multiply

• Reuse

Sounds too simple?

Good, that’s exactly what we want! Ready?

Developing a content radar

This is the foundation everything builds on, and it’s so simple because all it requires is a new mindset.

Think of it as putting on a pair of radar goggles that’s always scanning for content. You know those really cool green spy-looking ones from the early 2000s movies. The goggles are always there. When we’re walking, reading, spiraling over chapter twelve, and they allow us to constantly see the opportunities for what we can post.

They notice every time we have a relatable thought, difficult experience, fun idea, or other little life-nugget and goes “Ah! I can turn this into content.”

Everything won’t actually turn into content (thankfully), and the more you practice this, the more natural it gets until it’s just an automatic response.

So let’s look at this from a real-life perspective. You’re on a walk, and you find yourself thinking about a scene you can’t crack. Radar goes off — content idea. You read something that makes you think about your own writing differently. Radar goes off. You have a genuinely terrible writing day and feel like the whole manuscript is a disaster. Radar goes absolutely wild — that’s probably one of your best posts waiting to happen.

A photo from my last walk. No clue how I’d naturally work this into my content, but I saw it, giggled, and now here I am using it as content. The system works, friend.

The raw material for your content is already happening to you every single day. You’ve just been walking past it. Literally.

Spend a few days actively practicing this, and you’ll see how quickly it will become automatic.

Your idea catcher

Now that the radar is on, we need somewhere to put what it picks up. Because here’s the thing: content ideas that don’t get captured immediately get lost. We will not remember it later, no matter how obvious it feels in the moment. I know you know what I’m talking about!

The solution? An idea catcher.

It catches our ideas to put in a place that’s easy to reach. Easy enough that we actually use it in the middle of real life. While we’re making coffee. In the ten minutes before we fall asleep. Waiting in line at the store.

For most people, this is a note in their phone. It can be Notion, a voice memo, a physical notebook—the format doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s frictionless. If it takes more than five seconds to get to, you’ll skip it when it counts.

One important rule though: don’t just write a few words because “swear words” or “reading habits” will mean absolutely nothing three days later. Write enough to capture the actual thought—the key point, the angle, the feeling of it. Two or three sentences. One at the minimum. You’ll thank yourself later, I promise.

When the radar is running, and the catcher is set up, you will never need to create content from scratch again. You’ll sit down with an already compiled list and can just pick one. Imagine that.

Something I love doing is to take an extra thirty seconds to jot down two or three angles the idea could become right there next to it. Just as an extra little tip.

The content grid—one idea, many posts

Now this is where we go from useful to genuinely exciting, at least for my marketing brain.

A content grid takes one idea and multiplies it. It’s a simple framework—you can set it up in Notion, Google Docs, or on a piece of paper—where you list content angles across the top and your ideas down the side. Then for each idea you ask: how could I write this from another angle?

The angles I’d suggest starting with: relatable, educational, inspirational, entertaining & opinion. You can adapt these if you already know it doesn’t work for you, or as you go when you get a better feel for what your audience likes.

Let’s look at this more visually!

Say our content idea is building characters. Put it into the grid and suddenly our one post turns into five:

The relatable version is about how you personally struggle with a specific part of building characters. The feeling of writing a flat character and not knowing how to fix them. The moment a character finally clicked and what that was like.

The educational version is your actual process. The questions you ask yourself, the things you need to know before you start writing someone, the template or structure you use.

The inspirational version is about why characters matter so much—what a great one can do to a reader, why it’s worth the effort to get it right.

The entertaining version might be the most unhinged things your characters have done that genuinely surprised you while writing them.

The opinion version is your hot take. Maybe you think too many writers focus on backstory at the expense of present motivation. Maybe you have a strong stance on character description. Whatever you actually believe.

One idea. Five pieces of content, and that’s how the content grid works.

Now let’s try it again but with a very different idea—why enemies to lovers works.

The relatable version can be the visceral feeling of reading a perfectly executed slow burn. The educational version can be what actually makes the trope land versus what makes it fall flat. The opinion version is your specific take—what you love, what you’re tired of, what the best versions always have in common. Already three pieces, and we’ve barely started.

Turning one piece into three

You’ve probably heard of repurposing content before, but often it doesn’t truly click how to do that. So let’s see if this will simplify it.

Here’s one big secret:
You don’t need to be making new content all the time. There is no prize for inventing the wheel every Tuesday.

Becuase you are already sitting on a goldmine of content you haven’t used to its fullest!

Every article you’ve written contains multiple smaller pieces you can extract. Every note that sparked a real conversation probably has a full article inside it. Every opinion you’ve ever shared in a reply somewhere could be its own post.

The way to find them is to look at what you’ve already made with fresh eyes and ask three questions:

Is there a single line in here worth sharing on its own?
Is there a point I made briefly that deserves a full article?
Is there an angle I didn’t take that I could write separately?

Let’s say you wrote a review of your favorite book. Inside that article, you could find a quote worth sharing as a note, a separate article on what a writer could specifically learn from the prose, and a third piece on how that book influenced the story you’re currently writing. Three pieces of content from one thing you already wrote.

If you just came up with several more pieces of content you could write about—good! Take that vision and go over your own.

The same works in reverse too—a note that got a lot of engagement probably has a full article inside it waiting. An article from six months ago that your newer followers haven’t seen can become a fresh note pointing back to it.

Most people won’t see every post you publish anyway, so if an old Note worked well, you can absolutely return to the same idea later. Same point, different words. New angle, new timing.

Bonus tip: your two best creative windows

I’m putting this at the end because it’s the icing on the cake rather than the cake itself, but it’s genuinely worth knowing. If not for your content, you could use this for your writing.

Research shows we’re most creatively generative in two windows: the first hour after waking up and the last hour before going to sleep.

Our brains are either just coming out of or heading into a rest state, which loosens the kind of rigid linear thinking that blocks our creative flow in the middle of the day when we’re stressing about logistics and to-do lists.

You don’t need to write full articles in these windows if your life doesn’t allow it (mine rarely does), but using this time to create ideas in our content bank or draft our articles/posts will consistently produce better content than forcing it at 2pm when your brain is somewhere else entirely.

Try it for a week if you want to, and let me know how it goes!

What to do now

A little recap—the reason we run out of content ideas is that we try to generate them on demand instead of collecting them as we go. The system fixes that by keeping the radar on, giving ideas somewhere to land, multiplying them through the bank, and squeezing more out of what we’ve already made.

Here are some actionable steps to get it running:

👉 Start with the idea radar! Spend two or three days just noticing—don’t write anything down unless you want to. The purpose is to practice looking at your everyday life and asking what could be something.

👉 Set up your idea catcher in whatever format you’ll actually use. Phone notes, Notion, Google Docs—just make sure you can get to it in five seconds in the middle of life.
And remember, write the actual idea down, not just a word you won’t remember!

👉 Once you’ve got a few ideas collected, build your content grid. Pick five angles (or fewer if five makes you overwhelmed), take your first few ideas, and run them through it. You should have somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five pieces of content before you’ve written a single word of any of them. That’s at least two weeks’ worth of content, more depending on how often you post.

👉 Lastly, look back at what you’ve already published and find what else is inside it. Pick your two or three strongest pieces and pull at least one new post out of each.

My friend, the point is not to turn your whole life into content.

The point is to stop treating ideas like they only count if they arrive perfectly formed when you’re ready to post.

They’re already showing up; you just need somewhere to put them.

One more thing before I let you go

I have some news about this series.

Starting with Episode 6, new episodes of The Author’s Guide to Simple Marketing will step up a notch.

You’ve enjoyed this series for a few months, and it’s become something I take more and more seriously and want to keep making them even better for you. This is how I do that.

If you’ve found these episodes useful, if you’ve been in my dms thanking me because you finally see the path forward, if you’ve manged to get ideas you otherwise wouldn’t have come up with, then I’d love to have you as a premium subscriber.

I’ve spent the last 9 years in content creation and marketing, spent more than $30,000 on learning this knowledge, and made millions for clients, so I know this will serve you well. And no, I won’t charge you $997 a year like the other people in this space who has any type of knowledge. I am an author myself, and many of my friends are, too. I know marketing is ‘boring’ and harder than you’d like it to be. And buying something scary at that price isn’t in YOUR best interest.

Instead I’m launching it at $7/month or $70/year, and every future episode of the Guide will be there waiting for you. When you lock in now, I will not raise it for you in the future. You are part of my first subscribers and I cheerish that.

Episodes 1 through 5—including this one—stay free permanently. So if you want to share this with a writer friend who hasn’t found it yet, please do.

The next episode drops in two weeks. See you there.

Subscribe now

Now—what’s your biggest content struggle? Coming up with ideas in the first place, or actually sitting down and writing them once you have them? 👀