Thursday, June 9, 2011

The Truth About Creating Brands People Love - A Book Review

The Truth About Creating Brands People Love, by Brian Till and Donna Heckler, is available from Amazon as a Kindle book, retailing for $9.99, and as a trade paperback selling for about $14. I purchased the Kindle version of this book, not thinking of it as a book for authors, but rather for the other parts of my fledgling business.

I was wrong to think creating a brand was not something important for a writer to consider. For fiction and non-fiction writers, brand creation is an important issue for one simple reason, we all want repeat customers! Readers who purchase books written by a single author have identified with the brand created by the author.  How many of us have waited with anticipation for the next novel by our favorite fiction writer or have purchased everything written by a non-fiction author who is an expert on a topic of concern or interest to us? These authors have successfully created a strong brand readers identify with.

Brand management, and brand creation, is not a common sense topic though it seems like it should be. Successful brands have behind them a great deal of planning, research and hard work. Companies, and authors, with successful brands work hard to maintain and protect the carefully crafted brand. A successful brand is worth more than its weight in gold!

The authors share a total of 51 truths about creating successful brands. Each of these truths is essentially a stand alone chapter in its own right yet the authors have sequenced the chapters in a logical order.
Each chapter is well written, easy to understand and provides useful information for the reader, regardless of the whether the reader has a background in business and marketing or not.

Without being a spoiler, I will say the material in this book makes very good sense, yet it is not "common sense" information for the most part. I am reading the book for a third time and have nearly filled up a legal pad with notes on things I need to do or change with my business and approach to self-publishing. It has been money well spent.





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