Building a Personal Brand as an Author

Course summary: Build an honest, practical author brand that helps the right readers recognize your work. Across 40 lessons, create a reader promise, bios, a website plan, reader communications, promotion tests, a sustainable marketing calendar, and a portfolio grounded in your actual writing.

Course overview: This self-paced course serves beginning and experienced writers of fiction or nonfiction, including authors who do not seek commercial publication. No paid software, existing audience, or published book is required. You may complete tasks for a current manuscript or a clearly marked invented practice author. Allow about three to five hours per module, with additional time for the capstone. The resulting portfolio contains useful public-facing drafts, not promises of revenue.

Overall outcomes: Identify the reader experience your work offers; compare voice and niche claims; draft accurate author materials; plan a clear reader path; evaluate promotion choices and data; revise a coherent brand portfolio.

Assessment and completion: Complete all 40 writing labs and self-checks. Save every lab response in its numbered lesson in your Writer’s University workspace, or keep a clearly labeled local portfolio before transferring it. Revise drafts that fail the stated self-check; the final capstone in Lesson 10.4 is scored using the 100-point rubric. AI feedback is optional and is not a substitute for your own revision.

AI collaboration: You remain the author of every claim and creative choice. AI can compare wording or point out confusion if you give it a specific draft and request. Confirm facts, sources, sales assertions, and platform rules independently. Do not submit private addresses, confidential manuscripts, subscriber data, or other people’s stories without consent. You can complete every activity without AI.