I’ve been a little quiet on the blog because I have been creating a persona. Back in 2012 when  started writing professionally I had no clue what a persona or “brand” was. I just knew I wanted to write a book and I wanted to get it out into the world.

I didn’t know about marketing or having a presence. Online or otherwise. I simply thought that if I wrote the book I would have a legion of readers clamoring to get my book.  Yes the naivete was in abundance.

So in the last year or so I had been hearing how important it was to have a brand, a presence. The problem was I didn’t know how to achieve this. I was a writer and writers write, right? That sentence explains why I love language. In any case I was busy being a writer but not an author. There is a distinction and give me a moment to explain my humble definition of the difference between the two, for me.

Anyone can be a writer. I truly believe this. We are all storytellers at heart and utilize stories to communicate and convey ideas, emotions, and thoughts. We can all write-blogs, notes, letters, journals, short stories and books. It’s possible for anyone to write in any of these forms. Notice I didn’t say write well. The writer doesn’t need to be hampered by quality just output. As such a writer can express themselves in any format they choose. This is not to say that amazing writers are scarce. They abound in every format possible and I have been fortunate to read many of them.

However I feel ( and here many of you will probably disagree) the writer is not an author but the author must be a writer. Let me clarify before the flaming is launched. I will use my own experience as an example.

Lets jump back to 2012 my book is finished and so what do I do? I enlist my wife to edit it, she does a magnificent job considering what she had to work with. I then say to myself, “Well I have experience in graphic design, I’ll design the cover too!” I proceed to create what I thought was an amazing cover, except for one thing-it had nothing to do with the story. It was a picture of a Chinese dragon with some kanji overlaid over it and yes I thought it looked fantastic and would generate thousands of sales.

It didn’t sell well in fact it didn’t sell at all. Something was wrong, but I didn’t know what it was. Now jump with me to present day 2015-2016. Three years later I have seven books and four short stories out in the world. I decided it was better to keep my wife sane and hire a professional editor. I also educated myself about what makes a cover work and decided to go with several talented cover artists in addition to making some of my own). My books looked great and they were edited by my amazing editor Lorelei, who was uncompromising and yet understood the flow of story.

Now my books sold in the thousands! No, not yet, sorry. Something was still missing. How could that be you ask? Simple. There was no coherence. I had all the social media I needed. Facebook, Twitter, a blog and an email list ( that sat at 11 members for about two months with 5 of the members being family). The thing was they were all individual entities. Nothing connected them. The blog had one name, my Facebook page another and this blog yet another. I was all over the place. Yet even with all the disarray my books sold modestly, I was lucky.

This is a state many writers are in. You just want to get the word out that it doesn’t matter how it happens, except that it does. When you transition to to being an author things have to change. The first order of business, and mind that word business, because this is what it is when you are an author, a business. The first thing is to create coherence across every location where you leave a footprint. I tied in all my social media using the same name: Orlando A. Sanchez.

The next step was the presence of an author webpage, not this blog and not my amazon author page, although both can be used as places to direct potential readers. However your own webpage gives you incredible flexibility. Here’s mine. Take a look.

Once that was in place traffic was routed to it by ads and presence and the creation of more pages. New Facebook pages were created, strategies were implemented, a few new short stories needed to be written, edited and revised and then released( this killed me because I wanted everything to happen NOW). If this appears to be more like work and less like writing you’d be right. The last thing it resembles is the creative process of writing and yet it’s NECESSARY in order to shift from writer to author.

Yes it  sounds like marketing-the dreaded M word most writers cringe from and you would be right. There are ways to do this that dont require an astronomical cost, but they do require diligence on the part of the author.

I didn’t, couldn’t, do this alone. I had no clue as to WHAT to do. I needed help, but I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Enter John, who walked (and still walks) me through the process of being an author and treating my writing like a business. You rock John!

He took me through the steps, asked me deep questions and had me take the actions necessary to go from being a writer to being an author with a presence, a persona and a brand. He is brilliant at what he does and makes the complicated look deceptively simple. Dont be fooled. The amount of work required is staggering and you need to be committed. You can’t half ass this or you may as well not do it.

So is it working?

Even though I’m still fairly new to all of this, it looks promising. I wont bore you with details, although if you want them send me a message and I can share some of them with you. I will say this-I figured the total sales of 2015  and compared them with the month of January 2016, since I started this re-branding on December 31st of 2015. In the month of January I have made four times what I made in the entire year of 2015. My mailing list that sat at 11 subscribers for 2 months is now up to 340 in a few weeks and my launch team just took off and is starting to add members to it.

Yes it works.

Its not an  overnight process, but rather a gradual gaining of momentum, like an avalanche-a few flakes add up to a wall of snow racing down the mountain. The same with your readers. You start off small. You create community and then it starts to gain traction. This takes time.

This process also requires investment, but if you view your writing as an author and a business, and dont kid yourself-if you want to sell your books it is a business. If you understand this concept then you will understand that you have to invest in your writing in order for it to generate revenue.

Is this for everyone? I’m going to say, no.

Many writers are very comfortable just being writers and plugging away in obscurity. There is nothing wrong with this and we all start out this way. I would also argue that we have to be okay being unknown, at least in the beginning and keep plugging away without any kind of recognition.  And that can work. But for those of us that want to share our stories and attract readers, sell books and have a community gather around our work its going to take breaking out of that comfort zone and embracing being an Author.

What are your thoughts? I really enjoy hearing from you. Leave me a comment below and share your thoughts. You can also subscribe to my email list and get THREE of my books for FREE! These stories are available exclusively for my subscribers only. You can find them HERE.

Keep writing,

Orlando A. Sanchez