Optimizing Book Metadata with AI Tools

How do you stand out as an author when thousands of books are published every day? What's the difference between having a logo and having a real brand that sells books? Is it possible to maintain your authentic voice while appealing to genre readers who seem more loyal to categories than authors? With Steve Brock

In the intro, Baker & Taylor shutting down [The Bottom Line]; Holiday promotions for your books [Productive indie fiction writer]; Writing Storybundle; Updating Shopify metadata — Hextom app; Publishing and change [Publishing Perspectives]; Paying AIs to read my books [Kevin Kelly]; signing my special editions at BookVault; The Critically Reflective Practitioner; Deliciously twisted Halloween book sale.

Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started.

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Steve Brock is a nonfiction author, photographer, and branding expert. His books include Hidden Travel, which he has talked about on my Books and Travel podcast, as well as The Creative Wild, Make Something Beautiful, and Brand Something Beautiful: A Branding Workbook for Artists, Writers, and Other Creatives.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• Brand vs. reputation. Why branding is about perception in readers' minds, not just visual consistency
• Discovery vs. creation. How to uncover what makes you distinctive
• Standing out in crowded genres. Techniques for differentiating yourself while still satisfying genre expectations
• Multiple pen names. Managing branded houses vs. house of brands when writing across different audiences
• From brand to sales. Converting nebulous brand concepts into practical marketing confidence and clear messaging
• Beautiful book production. Creating workbooks and products that command attention in an AI-saturated market

You can find Steve at BrandSomethingBeautiful.com or brandsomethingbeautiful.substack.com.

Transcript of the interview with Steve Brock

Joanna: Steve Brock is a nonfiction author, photographer, and branding expert. His books include Hidden Travel, which he has talked about on my Books and Travel podcast, as well as The Creative Wild, Make Something Beautiful, and Brand Something Beautiful: A Branding Workbook for Artists, Writers, and Other Creatives, which we are talking about today. Welcome to the show, Steve.

Steve: Thank you, Joanna. It's a pleasure to be here.

Joanna: So much to talk about. But first up—

Tell us a bit more about how you got into writing and publishing and branding.

Steve: I've written all my adult life, but it was more in the realms of school writing and then working in branding and marketing agencies, doing a lot of marketing copy and ad copy.

Then in 2007, I think, I had this sense of wanting to work on a book, which was the one that ended up becoming Hidden Travel. It only took 14 years to get that from idea to publication. Since then, as you mentioned, some other books, so I've embraced that.

The branding has come along actually in parallel, and it's a great point of how one area of your life, particularly your creative life, affects the other. Branding fundamentally is about telling your story well. It's understanding who you are, what you do, and what makes you different.

There's a lot of storytelling involved. So the more I focus and spend time on writing, particularly in the fiction realm, which has been mostly just short stories for me lately, the more that it has improved the work of branding.

I find branding interesting because, like we've talked about with travel, branding is really about exploration. It's diving deep into understanding something that is hidden and bringing that to light.

Joanna: Before we get back into branding—

You mentioned short stories there. Are you publishing those?

Steve: No, those have always been a sideline. I have a novel that I started when I got stuck on Hidden Travel, and it's about maybe a third done, so that'll be the next effort that I focus on for the fiction realm. But no, the short stories have always just been more for my own craft building and just the enjoyment of it. I'm looking forward to actually reading yours that's coming out, or is it out?

Joanna: Well, as we record this, the Kickstarter has just finished. So depending on when this comes out, it may be available. The Buried and the Drowned is my short story collection.

I think it's interesting because you can play with short stories and you can explore, as you mentioned there, exploring and looking at hidden things. I think it's much easier to play around with short stories because you can just do such different things.

Let's come to branding, because the word “brand” is really difficult and people are already flinching. They're like, “Oh, I don't want to think about author brand.” So you mentioned a little bit there, but—

How are you defining brand as it relates to authors? And why should we even care about this?

Steve: The word “brand” applies whether you are a major corporation, a nonprofit organization, a single solopreneur, or an author, because it's all about perception.

A lot of people think of branding as being about your logo or your tagline, or maybe the colors that you use in the background of your Instagram reels and having consistency there. That's part of it, but it's such a small part of it.

Branding is fundamentally about the overall perception that people have of you or your creative work. If I say, for example, Stephen King, or James Patterson, or Toni Morrison, there are going to be associations you have with each of those people, and those associations are actually what make up their brand.

The brand is a tricky thing because we think we can control it, but we can't. The brand exists in the minds of your audiences. So for writers, that means the minds of your readers out there.

Your job is to craft it, to know the story you want people to tell and be able to reinforce that over time so that they're telling the same story. Because if you do not know the story you want to tell, someone else is going to do it for you, and most likely in a way that's not going to be helpful to you.

So just think of brand almost like your reputation. What are you doing to build up your reputation? That's maybe the simplest way to think about brand and branding.

Joanna: For authors, I mean for me, I have Joanna Penn and I have J.F. Penn.

So for anyone who's writing under two names, are we thinking about two brands?

Steve: Yes and no. Because you show up in a lot of places. For example, on this podcast, you show up as both people, not your products necessarily, but you as a person that represents both of those brands.

When you have an author brand with multiple pen names, there are elements of that you may want to keep discrete and separate. But on the other hand, in your case, the real divide there is—to oversimplify—J.F. Penn for the fiction and Joanna Penn for the nonfiction.

You as the person and the brand that you represent, there's a lot of consistency between those two. What you don't want to do is if those two brand names or author names are different and they represent two completely different audiences that you really want to keep separate.

The example I give in the book is if you're writing both children's illustrated fiction books and you're also writing erotica, you do not want those two audiences to even really know that you're the same person. So you would keep those dramatically separate.

It's the same in the corporate world where we talk about what the fancy jargony term is “a brand spectrum.” You have, for example, a branded house like BMW, and then a house of brands like Procter & Gamble, which has a whole bunch of sub-brands underneath that, and some people may not even know that Procter & Gamble is behind those.

If your pen names are really different genres, you're probably more like a house of brands. Whereas if you have a consistent vibe or theme or thing you want to be known for, you would be more like a branded house, even if you have different pen names.

Joanna: I like “branded house” and I like “brand spectrum.” That feels more natural, I think. There are also two angles that potentially we can approach this from. Maybe we can take them separately.

One is new author or author wanting to start a new pen name, wanting to construct a brand from nothing, from scratch—actually control it and build it.

The other way is discovery branding, let's call it, where you look back at your work and you go, “I guess I've somehow created a brand. I just can't figure out really what it is, but I just keep writing stuff and it kind of gets created.”

Could you tackle those two ends of the spectrum, of creating it from nothing versus discovering it?

Steve: That's a great question because I would say that discovering it is probably the more common approach.

One of the elements of your brand is your voice or your style, and I define those as three different things. Brand is the overarching perception. Style is the visual representation of the brand. Voice is the verbal or written representation.

I think that part of finding what your style and your voice are comes through discovery almost entirely. If you try to overthink it, it's really hard.

If you start that journey of discovery, focusing on a consistent and distinctive voice, it kind of emerges naturally and it's easy to step into that. There's a point though, even on a discovery brand as you name it, that it becomes intentional.

That's where you start to identify certain themes that have emerged that you want to be known for, and then you want to elevate those or amplify those. Honestly, that's like discovery writing. I'm kind of a hybrid myself. I will do an outline, but then I'll go off of it. Same thing here.

You're discovering your brand, but once you find, “Okay, that really resonates, that element really resonates with my audiences,” then you want to amplify that and make sure that gets incorporated into everything you're doing.

Now if you're just creating from scratch, you can actually define what those elements are. That's what the book is really about—how to create what we call a brand identity, which is just like a personal identity.

It's who you are, what are the elements, what are your characteristics, what are your personality traits, what's the promise that you make to your audiences? If you craft that from scratch, you can be very intentional.

I would say even there, just like a planner writer goes off script sometimes and starts going in directions they find that their characters have a life of their own, the same way here is you can map out that planned brand, but still be able to change it as you start to find things that resonate or that you want to lean into.

Joanna: One thing that I think of when it comes to brand is also book covers. Even if I used exactly the same name, if I used Joanna Penn for all of my books, my fiction would look quite different. Different color palette, different font, different design elements.

How can we relate book covers in particular to our brand?

Steve: It's consistency. Consistency is the key to all branding, whether it's for authors or anyone. As long as people can recognize you—think about branding, where it came from. It came from the American West and branding cattle to know that they belonged to a particular ranch.

A brand has evolved, but it is essentially about identification. I want to know what that brand stands for, who is it and who's behind it, and what does it stand for? On covers, you want consistency, you want a through line.

Really that's another way of thinking about a brand—what is that through line that you're going to find?

Now this is a key for authors, which doesn't exist completely in the same way in other industries: there are many, many readers out there that will always be more loyal to a genre than they are to a brand.

If you have a reader who absolutely loves your thrillers, and then all of a sudden you decide you want to start writing something in the romance category, well, they may still like you and get your books, but they're not going to necessarily buy your romance because the brand's not as strong as the loyalty to the genre.

Joanna: It's interesting also because I feel like authors know publishers and know imprints, but most readers wouldn't even know. They don't know HarperCollins or they don't necessarily know an imprint. Most readers are not loyal to those brand name publishing houses.

Secondarily, they may or may not care about an author brand, and as you say, they're more likely to be faithful to a genre. Most of us can't remember the names of the authors whose books we read. It's a sad truth, but some people will remember, and those are the people who I guess we're trying to connect with.

Is that right, or—

With our covers and our consistency, are we also appealing to those people who read by genre as well?

Steve: It's a little bit of both because we're dealing with that really wacky, crazy inconsistent thing called human beings. We're all that way. Like Walt Whitman said, we contain multitudes and we do contradict ourselves.

What you're really going after is not really like Kevin Kelly's thousand true fans, but something close to that. It's finding that super fan, it's finding those people that are going to follow you no matter what you put out.

The nicest compliment I ever received was at a travel writer conference. I did a workshop and the head of it said he really liked the particular piece and he said, “You're on your way to being that person of whom it is said, ‘Whatever Steve Brock writes, I will read it. I will read anything from him.'”

I am nowhere near there. I don't know if I will ever achieve that, but that's kind of the goal that you want to be for those particular super fans.

Here's where the brand kicks in. You can still betray even the most loyal fan if you write something that doesn't feel true to who you are as an author.

For example, let's think of Richard Osman. Richard Osman, who wrote The Thursday Murder Club and all those—if he were to go and write a science fiction genre book, there would be a ton of people that would follow him and want to read that book.

If, however, that science fiction book had no humor in it, and the characters were downright mean to each other and it was really violent and graphic, he would not only lose those readers, but they would probably be hesitant to pick up the next book in The Thursday Murder Club series because he's kind of wrecked his brand.

Joanna: It's so interesting. I'm going to blame you Americans for this because we're not so sensitive here in the UK, but swearing is a really interesting thing.

When I wrote my first book, in my private life, I do swear sometimes. In my first book, I had naturally written as a British person, had included some words.

The reaction I had from my American readers, who were not bothered by the violence—and I don't write graphic violence, but I write thrillers, so there's some body count—the reaction to the swear words made me decide, this is back in 2009 now, I was like, “Okay, I won't swear in my books.”

So I don't use swear words at all. It's so interesting how there are a lot of different genre elements that might put people off, but—

If you use a swear word that you wouldn't normally use in your books, that can make readers disappear and never come back.

Steve: Honestly, in today's world—and again, yes, you can blame America, but it has spread everywhere in terms of just how divided we are and how prickly we are in terms of topics and issues—basically anything you do will upset somebody. So you can't worry about that.

This is why you have to focus on that persona of that one true fan, your best fan, that you're writing towards. Because if you try to write towards every possible criticism, you're going to mess up. Just stick to that. Know that not everyone's going to be happy.

The example we give in a lot of corporate branding workshops: there's always a good number of people sitting around in the conference room with a MacBook or some Apple product, and I mention to them, “Do you realize that there are far more people in the world that absolutely rabidly hate Apple than there are people that love Apple?”

Just sheer numbers. If you look at PCs, for example, Apple has maybe an 8% market share. Is Apple a bad brand because so many people hate it? The reality is no, it's a great brand because those who do love it are even more passionate about it.

You're not going to be able to please everybody, but if you can please those who are in your tribe, then you're going to succeed. After all, we're in a “niches are riches” world. The more you niche down, the more profitable it is in today's world.

So don't be afraid of being true to who you are, but also being sensitive to who that audience is.

Joanna: I wasn't saying don't swear. I was saying if you decide to swear or not swear, stay consistent. The level of sex and the level of violence—if you're writing fiction, those three things are things that people's preferences generally stay pretty similar on within a brand.

So the mainstream thriller niche, those things—you could read a lot of mainstream thrillers and they would obey those rules as well.

You mentioned niching down and thinking about that, but one of the things you had in the book—and you have some really big questions in the book because one that is very difficult is: say you are writing action adventure thrillers.

So my Arcane series, a bit like Dan Brown. Dan Brown has a new book out, The Secret of Secrets, and I'm reading it at the moment and it makes me feel both happy because I write similar books to him, but also, “Oh no, I write similar books to him.”

You tackle this: how do I make my work distinctive and stand out amid all the noise? There is so much noise and I'm not competing with Dan Brown, by the way, but in terms of action adventure thrillers, there's tons of them.

How do we stand out when we also need to please genre readers?

Steve: I would say by knowing what it is that makes you distinctive. Part of it is your voice, part of it is your interest, part of it is just the way you go about framing sentences and plots and so forth.

Take, going back to Stephen King as an example—part of it, for loyal fans, they know this and they don't necessarily like it, but part of his brand is he doesn't end his books well. He's known in a lot of circles as just having pretty mediocre endings. But people don't care because they know that the journey to get there was really rewarding.

I would say things like that—being known for just a surprise ending, being known for—you know, the O. Henry Awards, right? We look at O. Henry simply because he was so good at those surprise twists at the end that we actually use his name today associated with that. Or even like Hemingway, his style, the short, curt sentences.

There are elements of your book that are going to be unique to you. For example, your voice, your human voice that comes across in your brand here. That's the main thing that I think people will identify with—separating out you and your products from you the person.

That can get kind of complex, but one of the key things to me is recognizing that your products are going to have a certain voice to them, and that voice in those genres may be different from genre to genre.

You as the author, as you're interfacing with the public, will have a consistent voice, but it's still different from you the person from Joanna Penn the person versus Joanna Penn the brand. Those are two different things, and that's hard for a lot of people. If you think about like an actor playing a character, it works pretty well.

We as authors, when we're publicly speaking or talking, there's a character that represents our brand that is going to be, in some ways the best of our personal characteristics, but it's not us. And that gives you some padding, some distance from it so that you can separate that out and be able to address it.

But going back to your point: knowing what the distinctives are of your own personality and the brand there, and being able to identify those and call those out—that's what helps you be distinctive.

If you do not know what those distinctives are, how you're different from Dan Brown in this particular case, it will be very difficult. And by just reading Dan Brown, it starts to seep in, and you might start writing like Dan Brown and you don't want to do that.

Joanna: I don't know, getting banned by the Vatican was the best marketing move he ever made! But on this, like you said there, if you don't know what makes you distinctive—from the side of many authors listening—

I don't think we do understand what makes us distinctive.

It is very hard. We have this thing in particularly the fiction community of finding your author voice. The reason we say “finding” it is because it's so hard, it's not obvious, and it takes practice writing lots of words and then something kind of emerges from it.

I think the question of what is distinctive—this is where AI can help. I've certainly done this: if people are happy uploading their work into ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini—read the terms and conditions as I always say—but you can then have a discussion with it as to what makes you distinctive, where do you fit in the spectrum of different authors.

I've actually found that the most useful tool, even though I've been doing this for a couple of decades, because it's so hard to figure it out yourself.

Steve: I totally agree with your last statement there, and I think that is a really good tactic for doing that. I would just add to it another thing that seems obvious, but I know so many authors who have never done this: You ask your audience. You ask your readers.

You take a dozen readers of any of your series, and you ask them, “Okay, why is this book different? What do you love most about this? What makes it distinctive from others?”

Now, they're not always going to be able to give you a clear idea, but pretty soon it's really interesting how themes start to emerge there when you start doing that.

I mentioned Richard Osman, for example. I could just whip off those as just three characteristics that make his books different: he has a really good sense of humor, his characters are all caring about each other, and he addresses age from a fresh perspective.

Many, many other authors address those three type of elements, but not in quite the same way. So in the same way with you, there's going to be elements that are going to be similar to Dan Brown and others, but that combination of those—that's something that only you do.

Joanna: I guess we've been talking a lot about fiction.

Is there anything that nonfiction authors need to think about differently, or do all the principles apply?

Steve: I think the principles are even clearer and in some ways easier to manage for nonfiction writers because you can talk about the subject. If you're thinking about nonfiction, it's like, “How do I become the thought leader expert on this?” And then what are the distinctive ways I'm going to treat things?

I can speak to it. Let's talk about from the standpoint of this book and from my own branding. I have been told by clients over the years—probably the best compliment I get is that “we've hired branding experts before, they come in, they tell us what they think our brand should be, and then we fire them.”

“We don't like consultants, but you don't act like a consultant. You came in and you listened and you heard us, and then you didn't tell us what we should be. You told us what we already knew, but we didn't have the words to use to explain that.”

So that tells me that my own brand is: there's a high degree of empathy, there's a high degree of listening, but there's also an element of synthesis. I can start to unpack those and say, “Okay, this is why my nonfiction book or works, in particular this book on branding for artists and writers, is going to be different.”

Another element would be simplifying. I've seen too many organizations, particularly working with nonprofits, that fail because they've tried to take on too much. So a key part of this is making it simple.

You start to understand what those elements—simplicity, empathy, synthesis—those things can become brand points, characteristics, distinctives, that then I could apply to other nonfiction works that I do.

Joanna: So then once we've got these, I guess, quite nebulous words around branding, how do we turn that into effective book marketing?

How do we go from this broader idea to specifics that will actually sell books?

Steve: I would say listen to your episode from, I think it was in August, where you read from Marketing for Authors, and you have the entire list of the specifics there. So those are the tactics that you can do in terms of selling more books.

Marketing is downstream from branding. But here's how branding can help you sell more books—two ways: internal and external.

First is the internal. Branding gives you the clarity of the messages that you want to communicate because it gives you a sense of what it is that you're really about. There's almost this idea of mindset that comes and the confidence that comes from having that clarity about what you stand for, what you believe.

One of the examples in the book is this exercise of “I believe… I exist to…” Just that simple sense of knowing what your purpose is and your beliefs and values are—that alone can help provide that clarity. So there's clarity, there's mindset, there's confidence.

Externally, your messaging becomes so much clearer because you know how to talk about yourself. That's the thing—authors, we are great at telling stories, but we're terrible at telling our own story.

That's what branding is about, is helping you to tell your own story better, so it builds the confidence, gives you the story that you want others to tell so that they can in turn tell others about you.

That's a huge piece of it. It's like the game of telephone. If you have a very clear and consistent message, they can tell others about you in a way that they couldn't before.

I think another aspect about this is that quite frankly, most authors can go out there and ask ChatGPT, “Give me 20 tactics that I need to do to market my book,” and you'll get them right away. There's no lack of access to information on how to market your book out there. The problem is we don't do it.

The reason we don't do it is because usually we're afraid. We're either afraid of what might happen, what people might think. We don't think we know enough to do it. We do all these things where we do not act.

Part of the beauty of the brand—you say it's nebulous concepts, but I would say that the nebulous concepts, the intangibles of life: trust, relationships, love, friendship, hope, accomplishment. Those are all nebulous concepts, but those are also the most powerful drivers that we have in life.

I think the same thing is here. You get that nebulous concept of knowing what you're doing and how you're different and how to tell your story better, and that builds your confidence. So you are far more likely to engage in doing those tactics that are going to help you sell the books.

Joanna: I wonder if it's also that in book marketing we do rely a lot on things like paid ads where the book cover is the thing that draws people in, and so having this sort of whole-self approach is less used.

Podcasting is a game, I think, where this kind of branding that you are talking about can really come across.

Is that a good way for authors to think about pitching different podcasts around elements of their brand—in terms of their story behind the books, the person behind the books?

Steve: Yes, I think podcast is one channel for that. I mean, your blog, if you have one, even your social media—all of those are ways for the audience to connect with you as the author, and you're absolutely spot on.

Because the problem a lot of times with author marketing is we confuse the author brand—which is almost like the equivalent of an organizational brand, but you're just a one-person organization—we confuse that with a product brand. The book itself is a product. It has in some ways its own brand, so it has to relate.

Just like I'm selling products on a shelf in a store, you're going to have one reaction to the product itself, and you're going to compare that to other products on the shelf.

Over time, if you find that there is a particular product from a particular manufacturer that you really like, you're going to be more loyal and you're going to start looking for other products in that line.

So the podcast, the blog, all these other touchpoints give people a way to engage with you so they know what other products… Here's a key thing about all this: think in terms of ecosystems.

We tend to think in terms of one-offs, like, “Oh, okay, I've got to work on this particular book. I'm launching this particular book. I'm doing the Facebook ads for this particular book,” and not thinking about how it relates back.

To your earlier question or comment about having consistency in the book covers, same type of thing. You want people to know that there is this through line, that there's this consistent connection back to something more.

If they can connect that to you as a person through the podcast or other ways of having more of the personality of you and everything else, all the better.

Joanna: I did want to also talk to you about the product itself, your book, which is this workbook. It's more than a workbook though because I think I have called some of my workbooks—they really only just contain the questions, not the full text.

Mine are also not designed and laid out as yours is. It really is a beautiful product in the layout, in the way it's done, and it makes me want to do better with mine. I wondered if you could maybe—

Talk about this product of a branding workbook because I feel it's so much more than that. And any other thoughts on multiple streams of income?

Steve: Thank you for that. I would say thank you also because unbeknownst to you, you were actually one of the reasons for this particular format.

It was probably a year or so ago on one of the podcasts where you said, “Amazon's pulling my workbooks because they're pulling everybody's workbooks because they're finding that people are using AI to say, ‘Hey, Claude, give me 40 different questions about this topic and some exercises,' and then they add in some fill-in-the-blank lines and publish it on Amazon.”

So the idea of that traditional fill-in-the-blank workbook, I think it made me hesitant to try something like that.

The other thing was I started this off as a course, and so the course creation—I had a lot of the graphics and different things in place, and it just ended up being that this became a hybrid.

So it's both a workbook and a book, but I think this is key, and I would say for a lot of listeners, if you're doing something particularly like this in nonfiction, to consider this approach.

It's not just a hybrid from a formatting standpoint, it's a hybrid in terms of the outcome or the goal of the book. Here's the thing I say in the book: The goal of this book is not to make you an expert on branding. The goal of this book is to help you create your own creative brand.

So this book, I do not care. After you're done with it, you've filled it in, it's an artifact of your learning. Every other book I've worked on has always been about educating, and this one is about accomplishment.

I think people today—we have too much information out there. People want to achieve things and get things done, and so the more that you can think of formats that are going to help with that, I think the better.

The other thing about it is breaking it down to smaller bites and takeaways that people can use.

I'm also mindful of just the positioning of it. I think it was Jonah Berger in his book Contagious, who talks about venture capitalists and how when they're evaluating a company, they look at it and say, “Is this company a vitamin or a painkiller?”

A vitamin is something that's very good for you and very useful and very healthy, but you can put it off. A painkiller—if you got pain, you need it right away.

My previous book, The Creative Wild on creativity, it was very vitamin-like. I would actually say that even Hidden Travel was more of a vitamin. It's good for you, it's interesting, it's about meaningful travel, all of that. But it's not a pressing felt need for a lot of people.

I think this book on branding for those who are struggling with marketing and everything—I positioned this one, it really is more of a painkiller. So the question for all of you out there listening is—

How can you make your nonfiction work more of a painkiller?

Then look at other formats that are related to it. Another key aspect of this is that the workbook has a paper and a Kindle version, but then the worksheets—I call them worksheets—I have two versions: a Google Doc version and a fillable or editable PDF version that are on my website that have all the questions.

It doesn't have all the explanatory text, but it has all the questions and all the fields. But what I'm doing is I'm sending people to my website and they have to sign up for it. So now all of a sudden you've got them into the broader ecosystem there. And there could be follow-ups, right?

You've already written the marketing book, so I don't need to do that, but I could take any chapter and go into much more detail about it. I could do this and there's a tiny element in this thing on choose-your-own-adventure.

There are ways of formatting a book so it's more of a choose-your-own-adventure or a scavenger hunt, which is more of a guidebook that could help people. You can have additional merchandise that's related to it. All these different things.

I have a friend, Naomi Kinsman, who has a “creativity in a box” type of thing. So these boxed elements, lots of ancillary products that you can add to that for multiple streams of income as well.

Joanna: Your book also leads to speaking engagements. It really is—it's beautiful. I do want to emphasize that, but you've also made it harder on yourself. So one of the reasons that we as independent authors have done more basic workbooks and have done more basic books is because of the cost of production. I wondered—

Has this made it more complicated for you to sell?

Or are there different versions of the print edition for, say, Amazon print-on-demand versus selling from your website, for example? Because it looks very high quality.

Steve: Yes, but it is the same for all of us, right? The more heavy lifting you do upfront, the easier you make it for others. So yes, it has been a pain. I will not argue about that.

I think the writing of this was the easiest book of all because it's just 27 years worth of expertise that I could just—I didn't have to research anything. I just whipped it out. That part was easy.

Formatting it, getting into all that—pain in the ankle. But I think that it makes it more accessible for people, because a lot of people have the same reaction that you have. With the title, like Brand Something Beautiful, you kind of want it to look that way.

That has been actually an allure to people. I don't think that a lot of the graphics got translated into the Kindle version of it. The tablet version that's full color works, the Kindle version—I had to scale down a lot. But that's okay because it still delivers the product as well.

Joanna: I love AI, everybody knows that, and I use it a lot, but I also don't like the sort of mass-produced books that are coming out. So anyone who puts more effort into physical production of beautiful products is going to stand out.

I mentioned about what is it that makes you distinctive, and I'm at this kind of point in my career where I also want to be known for making beautiful books. So I love that you've used the word “beautiful.” We all love beautiful books and we buy stuff because we love covers and we love the foil, and we love all the cool stuff.

Just so people know, on your website, brandsomethingbeautiful.com, you can see examples of the interior pages so people can see how that is done.

Did you do this yourself or did you work with a designer?

Steve: I worked with the designer actually, though the full disclosure is my son is a graphic designer and a brilliant one. So he did all the graphic elements.

What I did was—and this is taking the extra step—I remember there was, I think it was Steve Zaillian, some producer in Hollywood years ago who's been dramatically successful, and someone said, “How did you become so good at this?” And he said, “Because I looked around at the work that needed to be done and I looked at the level of effort that other people were making, and I just did a little bit more.”

I think on here, I upped my game using Adobe InDesign for the layouts and things like that. I would encourage people that there's so much you can do in Canva these days. Just dive into it and get competent in it. But I think there are also times when you do want some professional design help on it as well.

Joanna: It's interesting you mentioned Canva because I'm sure you've heard me talk about my gothic cathedral book, and over the summer I was looking at my photos,and obviously you are a photographer as well and you do travel stuff, and I was like, “Oh my goodness, there's so many ways this book could go in terms of how the beautiful layout is done.”

It almost just opens up a completely different form of creativity, even though that's not something I'm focusing on right now because it feels like a whole other area. I also feel like it does help set us apart. As you said, it's that extra effort in terms of making a beautiful interior as well as a beautiful cover.

I think nonfiction, this is easier because, fiction, obviously the inside of a novel is plain text mostly—you can do some extra title pages or maps or whatever, but I think these nonfiction books can have all kinds of elements of design that help people: pull-outs and quotes and diagrams and all this kind of thing.

So it is a really creative process.

Steve: It totally is. I just read a book—we're about to head off to Portugal soon, just for vacation—but I was reading a book that takes place in Lisbon called The Murderer's Ape, like ape as in gorilla. It's about a gorilla who can speak and is an engineer on this guy's boat.

The long story of it is at the beginning of each chapter are just kind of these beautiful hand-drawn pen and ink illustrations, and just having that makes it such a richer experience. Little things like that.

So there's a case where, if I had more time in my life and everything, I would be focusing on illustrated adult books, which are fictional like a novel, but that I illustrate.

What is it? The T.S. Spivet by… can't remember his name. They made it into a movie, but The Life of T.S. Spivet. Anyway, he does that. It's a brilliant book because of the illustrations that are on the margins of almost every single page. So there are ways of doing that even in fiction.

Joanna: We've all got to do more creative stuff in order to stand out, and for ourselves as well as for the readers. It kind of just brings the material alive. So I think that's really cool.

But you mentioned there heading off to Portugal, and you and I connected around our love of travel. Hidden Travel I think is a wonderful book and you came on my Books and Travel podcast and we talked about that.

This is an interesting thing, right? Even for your brand, because brandsomethingbeautiful.com to me doesn't look like the same person who did Hidden Travel. The conversation we had around that, to me, is very different conversation to the one we've had today.

So how does travel weave into your business? Or do you feel like those two things are quite different?

Steve: Oh, you called me out because it's like, you know, do what I say, not what I do. Because I totally feel that way. Honestly, from my own brand and what I'm trying to do, I probably should. You know, what is it? The cobbler's children have no shoes.

Joanna: The cobbler's children have no shoes or something like that.

Steve: Right, exactly. Well, but the answer to that is, what you're going to see over time is I start to build out more of particularly some of the social media stuff for Brand Something Beautiful, and this goes back to the idea of confidence.

Once the book is done, I'm into getting it out there. I'm like you, I do not like video, I do not like to be on video, et cetera. So I've never done anything, but I decided for this book I'm going to do Instagram reels.

One of the things I did was—I think it was either Gemini or ChatGPT—I just said, “Okay, here are the themes that I want to cover. These are going to be like blog posts and Substack type of things and LinkedIn articles over the next 12 weeks. Give me—and I'm going to be in these places in Portugal. I want to create reels that illustrate these points. Give me some ideas.”

It came out with some really wonderful ideas like the 25th of April Bridge in Lisbon. It said the point is that one of the points in the book is that the brand is the bridge between the making of something beautiful and the marketing of it.

Most people, artists especially, and writers, we hate marketing, but if you do the branding right, it's the bridge between it, so it makes the marketing easier. And so then have a shot of me holding the book in front of the bridge and blah, blah, blah.

Joanna: Nice. That is great, actually, that's a really good prompt. Thank you for that.

Steve: Yes. So those type of things. I'm definitely using those, so you will start to see a connection between the travel and the brand, but it will emerge over time because in a way, I have my brandwallop.com, which is the company, the agency I've run for decades.

That's really more for corporations and nonprofits. So this Brand Something Beautiful is really more the individual brand type of stuff. It is exactly what you were talking about earlier. There's some intentionality to it. I have not fully lived and leaned into that as much.

The travel and adventure—because the theme of my other book, The Creative Wild, was about what does it mean to create adventurously? It really is like a sequel to Hidden Travel in the sense of what do we learn from travel that we can apply to our creativity?

How do you create adventurously? What does that mean? What does that look like? How does discovery fit into creativity? All of that type of thing.

So that will all get woven in there. But the main thing of all is that even if it never shows up in my external artifacts and manifestation of the brand, it is affecting me as a person, as a creative.

As you know, in fact, one of the quotes—I paraphrase, I should say—from you, I think it was on the St… was it St. Cuthbert, the one you did in the southern part of England?

Joanna: The Pilgrims Way to Canterbury.

Steve: Okay, the Pilgrims Way. You said something after that in one of the podcasts, which I have told so many other people because it is so true. When I heard you, it's like, “Okay, validation.”

It was this: “I went on this pilgrimage thinking I would have all this time walking and I would have all this time to come up with new ideas. And I had like virtually none on the trip itself.”

Joanna: Hmm.

Steve: But then two weeks later, after I got back, I couldn't stop the ideas. I was overwhelmed with all the new ideas that came, and to me that's the benefit of travel for all of us.

Yes, you can use the sites for, if you're writing a novel, for getting the research. I know you love doing that and that's a key piece of it, but just the experience of getting out of your comfort zone, being in a foreign place, particularly where your senses are picking up on things.

You notice things better, you pay better attention. All of that is going to help you as a creative.

Joanna: It's so interesting and I'm glad we kind of finished with your own personal journey of growing into this other side of yourself as well, or trying to knit them together. I think that's brilliant. It certainly shows that we're all on this journey. This is a lifetime of experience and we just keep creating.

So people, if you are like, “Oh, I just don't know,” just keep creating and something will emerge, won't it?

Steve: It is absolutely true, and that would be one thing I didn't mention earlier, really quickly, that relates to this in terms of those other streams of income: this idea of combinatorial thinking, where everything you do affects everything else in a good way.

To me in terms of multiple streams of income, the question is, rather than thinking of these one-offs, but this idea of ecosystems—how it all relates to each other and how can I leverage that?

I may do this, but I would say advice to anyone out there is: instead of selling individual courses—not instead of, in addition to selling like individual courses and books—start thinking in terms of membership programs.

There's a ton of membership programs out there, but most of those memberships, or even like the subscriptions, like if you have a paid subscription on Substack or something like that, or even Patreon, is to treat those less as just like this gathering place for people to get additional content, but to make it more achievement-oriented.

What can I accomplish? Are there steps? Think in terms of the audience's pathways and their journey through that, so that membership has these elements of like, “I'm gaining something and I'm growing through this.”

Key to that is gamification. Things like levels of rewards, of access, of just status. All these different things we can learn from gamification that you can be applying to that.

Quite frankly, I don't think you have done this overtly or consciously, Joanna, but I think you do a great job of that. Like with your Patreon, you don't just say, “Okay, I'm going to give you access to just additional content.”

Yes, you do that, but in addition, there's a sense of belonging, there's a sense of participation, there's a sense of access that you get to you. And all those little elements really are about the key.

The last section of Brand Something Beautiful is all about creating experiences of delight rather than trying to see your audience as someone you want to sell to. It's someone you want to delight. So what do you do? What can you do with every little touchpoint?

All these little touchpoints add up. So whether it's travel and how that helps us to learn new things, or it's intentionally using your multiple streams of income—all the different books, merch, all that stuff coming together. If you focus on it being about delighting your audience, it just changes the whole way you look at them.

Joanna: Fantastic.

So where can people find you and your books online?

Steve: Probably the easiest way for the purposes here would be BrandSomethingBeautiful.com or Substack, brandsomethingbeautiful.substack.com.

Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Steve. That was great.

Steve: Thank you.

---

The post Brand Something Beautiful: How Authors Can Stand Out In A Crowded Market with Steve Brock first appeared on The Creative Penn.