Author Branding: Brand Yourself And Your Work



By Wendy C Allen
eelkat_red_scarf.jpgWendy Christine Allen, 2019, able to sit up in a chair for the first time in years, and able to raise up my arm and wiggle fingers. This was when I started playing Witcher 3 on Twitch as part of my physical therapy to regain finger movement. Playing Witcher 3 daily from 2016 to 2019, is how I regained the use of my thumb and two for fingers on my right hand... it is also why I stopped playing Witcher 3 in 2019, once I had strengthen my two forefingers enough to start typing again.

Wendy Christine Allen, Old Orchard Beach's Autistic Author, Artist, Illustrator, & Art Car Designer

Counting Down to the September 23, 2028 50th Anniversary of my first published book (September 23, 1978)

If you are here looking for The Twighlight Manor series, The Crystonite Wars series, The Wild Years series, The White Rock Asylum for the Criminally Insane series, The Twisted Tales series, the Captured By a MerMan series, The Space Dock 13 series, The Kats of Planet Ptarmagin series, the stories about Miss Citten the Eel-Kat, or the stories about Etiole... ALL of those series were combined and consolidated into The Adventures of Quaraun the Insane Pink Necromancer series in 2014, so ALL the different series, are now under one series title.

List of the published titles still in print:

The Index of over three thousand stories in The Pink Necromancer series

What the series is about, for those new here:

The introduction to The Pink Necromancer Series. 

If you want some stories to get you started in The Pink Necromancer series, reading these first will give you a good introduction to the 3 main characters:

My Elves Are JellyFish...and I asked Google AI and ChatGPT 5.6 what they thought of this.

As requested, my daily writing prompt series is now available print paperback editions on Amazon.

There are 20 volumes of this writing prompt series currently planned and in varying stages of finishing, hopefully all 20 will be published by the end of 2026. I likely will do a 2nd series of writing prompt books in 2027.

The first of the Visual Novels/Video Games for The Adventures of Quaraun the Inane/The Pink Necromancer series is published and available on Itch.io, there are 3 more planned for release in 2026, 6 more planned for release in 2027, and the big 60-hour 80k word 150 page one (Quaraun Goes To the Fair) is planned for a 2028 release.

There is a Pink Necromancer card game and a Pink Necromancer board game, as well as a Pink Necromancer table top RPG supliment for Dungeons and Dragons, all in the works, and to be released over the next couple of years as well.

Health update: August 4, 2026 - in recovery for 6 months+ (at least until mid-January 2027...all book and video game releases are pushed back at least 6 months) see video below for why...
@eelkat

health update #maine #disabilityawareness #wheelchairlife #wheelchairvlogger #multiplesclerosis

♬ original sound - Wendy C Allen | 📚 Author
@eelkat Health update: #chickenpox #bellspalsy #RamsayHuntsyndrome #paralysis #recovery ♬ original sound - Wendy C Allen | 📚 Author
@eelkat

I seem to have had another stroke (during the night while I was asleep?) #stroke #paralysis

♬ original sound - Wendy C Allen | 📚 Author

Update Sept 3, 2026:

I am able to get around enough to take Koko to dog park... today is 29 days since getting out of hospital. My diet is still mostly liquid, but im eating some solid food again, but its like rice or soft mushy baby food type stuff because I still can not chew yet, though I can swallow again. My jaw is still not functioning good so im having trouble talking still. So there's been slight improvement to my mouth, throat, and jaw, but, zero improvement to my eye, which is a major concern, be Im almost fully blind right now. im legally blind since birth in my left eye, so I have no ability to fall back on using my left eye. My right eye is the one injured and my vision in it is "40% decreased" according to my doctor, but it wasn't good vision to begin with, and right now my right eye is not much different from my legally blind left eye. Which I why I have to have someone drive my car for me instead of me driving my car myself right now, which is very frustrating, because, being a female, I had to fight for over twenty years to be allowed to drive. I started sneaking out at age 31 and dressing as a man to go to Old Orchard Beach high school to get a ged, because us females are not allowed to go to school. And i was 37 years old when snuck out to the DMV and got a driver's permit and started going to college. I was 42 and 8 months pregnant when my family found out I was going to college and thats when I was punished by the backhoe driving over my house and my spine broken with a golf club and my baby born right then and killed with same golf club. So it's very frustrating now, so soon after finally being able to drive , to now not be able to drive because of an eye injury, especially after 14 years of being paralyzed from the golf club and not being allowed to have a wheelchair, again, because i am female and we females are simply not allowed to do anything. I hate the culture I was born into. I wish I had the freedom to go to school and drive a car the way American women do. I wish having my spine broken with a golf club and my baby killed with a golf club and a backhoe driven over my house was not how men in my family punishment women in my family for learning to read and write. Its so frustrating not being able to to drive again, so soon after 14 years being paralyzed, and being paralyzed by the golf club was the punishment for getting a driver's license back in 2013 after 30 years of men not letting me have one. I hate my family's culture and how they treat us women.

I get so sick of Americans telling me how they wish they could be a Gypsy… they are either misogynist woman hating pigs, or delusional idiots who haven't got a clue how shittily we Gypsy women are treated by Gypsy men, because no one in their righ mind who knows anything about Gypsy culture would ever want to be part of it. I hate that I was born a Gypsy. 

update sept 7, 2026

"You would not make a good teacher"... what does that mean, and why are there so many people on Railroad Ave and Western Ave and Cutts St why walk up to me and say that to me?

I find it very confusing. I have low functioning Autism (the Rain Man type) and so i have very little understanding of words beyond the basic ones, and i never went to to school, so I never learned maths or sciences, and I only had remedial classes at Southern Maine Community College, because I did not have an education to enroll with regular, I was there taking every reading and writing class they had to learn how to read and write, and also took speaking classes to learn how to talk (i spoke Shetland Scottish language because that was language my grandmother spoke but she died when I was 8 so I only knew that language to speak and write, and I was 37 when I went to college and 42 when I learned English speaking and I still cant speak English good yet), all the other classes I took were art painting and cooking.

So the phrase "You would not make a good teacher" makes no sense to me because it seems to imply that I am trying to be a teacher, but I don't have anything close to the education ti be a teacher, and im not trying to be a teacher. So I don't know why people keep saying this phrase to me and I assume it must have some sort of a slang meaning, but I can't figure out what it could be of why do these people keep saying it to me.

see video below for more information: 


@eelkat "You would not make a good teacher"... what does that mean, and why are there so many people on Railroad Ave and Western Ave and Cutts St why walk up to me and say that to me? I find it very confusing. I have low functioning Autism (the Rain Man type) and so i have very little understanding of words beyond the basic ones, and i never went to to school, so I never learned maths or sciences, and I only had remedial classes at Southern Maine Community College, because I did not have an education to enroll with regular, I was there taking every reading and writing class they had to learn how to read and write, and also took speaking classes to learn how to talk (i spoke Shetland Scottish language because that was language my grandmother spoke but she died when I was 8 so I only knew that language to speak and write, and I was 37 when I went to college and 42 when I learned English speaking and I still cant speak English good yet), all the other classes I took were art painting and cooking. So the phrase "You would not make a good teacher" makes no sense to me because it seems to imply that I am trying to be a teacher, but I don't have anything close to the education ti be a teacher, and im not trying to be a teacher. So I don't know why people keep saying this phrase to me and I assume it must have some sort of a slang meaning, but I can't figure out what it could be of why do these people keep saying it to me. #mainelife #biddefordmaine #maine #disabilitytiktok #Biddeford ♬ original sound Wendy C Allen | 📚 Author

update Sept 15, 2026:

I have some slight movement in some my fingers again again after over a decade being paralyzed

you remember how I used to be a professional doll making, pattern designer, and embroiderer, back before I became paralized and before my son was murdered and being the backhoe drove over my house?

all my equipment, sewing machines, ect were all destroyed by the backhoe driving over my house, and I have been quardepelegic for over a decade because of it so could not use my hands to sew or draw or embroider, and so only continued to do my writing of novels since then because I could do that with dragon dictation software,

well, since 2016, I been playing Witcher 3 and don't starve video games on twitch livestream, one hand two fingers, as part of my therapy to regain nerve and muscle use of my fingers, and now after 10 years of that, I have somewhat more movement in my fingers and im thinking maybe I can try to do embroidery and doll making again, but not sure, anyways, now im rebuying all of my sewing and embroidery equipment that the backhoe destroyed when it drove over my house, and hopefully I can use my hand enough to embroider again.

waiting for stuff to arrive in mail, so soon I should find out if ten years of twitch gaming has given me enough muscle strength to use my fingers to embroider again.

update to the previous video, answering viewer question about lack of hospital vs broken spine

Wheelchair Fundraiser... I need to upgrade to a power wheelchair, the manual one just isn't enough anymore. But the power wheelchair is $25k. Yes, twenty five thousand dollars. Wtf? I can get a car for a quarter that price, why are wheelchairs so damned expensive? That's more money then I make in five years, so I need to start a fundraiser for it.

Comment
byu/ElectronicTheme8163 from discussion
inwriters

FR NEED HELP!
Just let me know your suggestions or you think i need to keep in mind or do anything in the journey.
I'm at the basics, But working to upskill in the SEO field through creating ai blog post with my modifications in the content. I'm looking to create me as a personal brand on the social media in the field with journey of my every step to forward ! I'm just also looking to work on my agency's SEO.

>I'm looking to create me as a personal brand

No one becomes a personal brand until AFTER they are famous.

To become famous you FIRST have to do something noteworthy.

People do not follow average Joe's. People follow someone interesting. Someone different. Someone who stands out from the crowd.

So to build yourself as a personal brand, your first step is to do something fan worthy. Do something to make people want to be your fan.

Take authors for example.

Many people have an idea, but few write it down.

Of the few who write it down, even fewer ever go on to flesh it out.

Of the few who flesh out their idea, even fewer ever go on to finish writing it.

Of the few who finish writing their book, even fewer go on to edit it.

Of the few who edit their book, even fewer go on to publish it.

Did you know that over four thousand books are published every day on Amazon KDP?

Did you know that there are more than twenty million authors on Amazon?

Did you also know that since Amazon started KDP in 2007 that there have been fewer than one thousand authors who sold more than one hundred thousand books?

Did you know that the average traditionally published book will only ever sell five thousand copies in its lifetime?

Did you know that the average self published book will only ever sell five hundred copies in its lifetime.

Did you know that there are over twenty million authors on Amazon whom have YET to earn their first one hundred dollar payment? And many of them have been published for over a decade now?

Did you also know that since 2010 I have sold over ten MILLION copies of my books, and I am in the top 7% highest selling authors in the world?

Did you also know that unless you read Yaoi, you probably never heard of me or my books, in spite of my being one of the top one thousand highest selling novelists of all time?

Why is this possible?

Branding.

Narrow focused targeted branding.

I don't target my brand towards EVERYONE because most people will have ZERO interest in my brand.

But within the community that DOES want my brand, they know me by my brand.

What do people think of when they hear my name?

PINK.

They think a pink Volvo, a pink Dodge Sportsman Motorhome, a pink website, a transvestite Elf who wears pink dresses, a serial killing pink unicorn who eats Humans and skewers their skulls on his horn, pink book covers, pink, pink, pink, pink, and more pink.

When my fans line up at conventions and book signings to meet me, what do they expect to see?

PINK.

Flamboyant pink extremes. Me wearing rhinestone encrusted pink silk, massive pink hats, gigantic pink hoop skirts, and me CosPlaying The Pink Necromancer.

Pink is my brand.

2028 will be the 50th anniversary of my first book featuring The Pink Necromancer.

I've spent almost five decades making PINK, eye popping day glow trimmed bubble gum pink, my brand.

After pink, what else do people think?

Elves and Unicorns.

NBQuaraunBoomFuzzyCandyUnicornscreenshot3.png

I'm the world's top authority on Elves and Unicorns, and I have been since 1978.

For five decades people have come to me to ask for advice on how to write Elves and Unicorns, how to create Elf and Unicorn characters, and how to build Elf and Unicorn societies.

THAT is my personal brand. I am the world's number one go to expert whom new wannabe young writers contact when they want to know how to write anything related to Elves and Unicorns. And they know to find me by looking for my pink EVERYTHING.

Pink, Elves, and Unicorns THAT is my personal brand.

BUT… outside of the Yaoi community, you likely never heard of me at all. And yet, I have sold over ten million books.

I am not a well known or household name, but I have sold more books than the average New York Times list best-selling author will ever sell in their lifetime.

Why?

How?

By knowing exactly WHO the people who want my products are and targeting ONLY them.

It would be a waste of marketing money for me to mass market my books or my brand to the general public, because the general public is going to be largely uninterested in me, my brand, or the products my brand sells.

There is no point in tossing my brand in front of people who would never touch it with a ten foot pole. And THIS is WHY I sell books in leaps and bounds, while so many other authors flounder.

Because I am well aware that my product (Gay Romance novels about Gay Elves dating Gay Unicorns) is NOT for everyone. So, I do not market it to everyone.

They buy ads on Amazon and Facebook and dump tens of thousands of dollars into telling the general public mass market readers of Amazon and Facebook book about their book, and wonder why they got no sales.

The answer is simple. Their personal brand is not something the general mass market public is interested in.

You don't market Romance novels to Dark Souls gamers.

You don't market decon to pet rat owners.

You don't market Volvo parts to Chevy drivers.

You don't market a butcher shop to a vegan.

Knowing your audience is an integral part of personal branding.

You can not build yourself up as an in demand brand that people want, until you first know what it is people want. But, you also have to realize every sub culture in society has different wants and needs.

If your personal brand is heavy in black lace Vampire Goth Fashion, you'll not find many followers by pushing ads in front of the pink glitter BarbieCore crowd.

You have to decide WHAT exactly your personal brand is.

Your personal brand is YOU.

Okay. But who ARE you?

And WHY should people care?

Figure that out first.

Next figure out WHO cares about the type of brand you are.

Then, figure out WHERE that type of person hangs out.

This is what I did. I made myself a personal brand. I built an identity. I created a product. I researched who wanted that product. I tailored my product to meet their demands. Then I strategically placed my product ONLY on the locations those types of people hung out.

I did not waste my time or money, trying to get my products in front of everyone, everywhere.

Personal branding is not about trying to get your face in front of EVERYONE everywhere. It's about getting your face ONLY in front of the type of people who are most likely to be interested in what you have to offer.

Trying to be everything to everyone in every place is going to cause you to crash and burn big time.

You need to narrow focus WHO you plan to sell to, figure out what you can provide that they ACTUALLY WANT,and only then can you start figuring out how to brand yourself in such a way that they will prefer you over your direct competitors.

Personal branding is about getting your face in front of the right people, in the right places, at the right time.

What I mean is, you have to BECOME what the people of a SPECIFIC GROUP want.

If you try to please everyone, you'll end up satisfying no one.

So, BEFORE you can become a personal brand, you FIRST have to figure out what you have, what you can provide, and then you have to figure out who wants what you have, how will you provide it to them. And target ONLY THAT ONE GROUP OF PEOPLE.

EelKatAsQuaraunPinkNecromancerPortCon2016bannersbi640.jpg

Who are YOUR people?

What do YOUR people want from you?

This is how you become a personal brand. By providing people with what they want. By doing it in such a unique to you alone way, that they can not get it from anyone else.

The reason so many brands fail early in their startup phase is because they spend too much time thinking about me, myself, and I, instead of thinking about how they please others, how they can serve others, what they can give to others.

Remember, people are just as selfish as you are, your audience DOES NOT care about you and they never well. Your audience ONLY cares about what they can mooch off of you, and if you are too busy trying to meet your own needs, to meet their needs first, then you'll never earn an income and your needs will never be met.

THAT is the number one reason for EVERY business failure.

They focus on me, me, me, me, me, me, and oh yeah, me. They forgot to focus on their audience. **Your content is NOT for you. Your content is for your audience.** If you put this idea front and center in your mind, and keep it as your primary motto while planning your career, you will already be leaps and bounds ahead of more than 80% of other startups.

Keep telling yourself **Your content is NOT for you. Your content is for your audience.** Tell yourself this every step of the way.

Why?

Because if you want to become a personal brand, you need to become a person whom other people WANT to follow. And you do that by satisfying THEIR needs NOT your needs.

>creating ai blog post with my modifications

And newsflash, if you are using AI to write your blogs, then you haven't got a clue what a blog even is. Heck, if you are using AI to write blog posts, I seriously doubt you know what the phrase personal brand means either.

When I land on a blog I expect to see actual blog posts aka logs written by the blogger. Traditionally a log is a daily update in a journal of a ship's captain, to keep track of daily events, news, changes in weather, ect. Logs are meant to inform the reader, traditionally to inform the crew of information in case the ship's captain becomes ill and someone else needs to take over the ship, they can read the captain's log and see exactly all the information they need to know to keep the ship operational.

A blog is based on that concept.

A blog is a place where a person posts daily updates on a topic affecting their life. For example a dog groomer blogs daily logs about the dogs her clients bring in, an aggressive chihuahua that needed to be sedated to get his nails trimmed, a giant newfoundland who broke her grooming table, her supplier sent the wrong shampoo... readers return each day to get the daily gossip of who's dog is going to do what next.

If you are a car blogger, I'd expect to see an auto mechanic talking about which car his clients brought in today. The 1987 Honda Civic with 300k miles, the 1991 Volvo with 2.5million marbles glued to it... as a builder of art cars, a builder of Monster trucks, and restorer of antique cars, (I am EelKat) I would be very interested in reading the daily logs of an auto mechanic but... I have ZERO interest in reading generic dime a dozen crap an ai spit out.

You will not succeed in being a personal brand if you are not a practitioner of what you preach, because you will have no clue if ai is preaching inaccuracies. If you are a car blogger and you have some hugely inaccurate info that people like me who actually repair cars are going to notice, this will kill your personal brand fast... this is why ai fails... because most people who use it are not well enough informed via personal hands on experience in their topic to fact check it.

Personal branding works, when readers have a reason to actually read your daily logs about your daily job in your daily life. TO FIND OUT DEEPLY PERSONAL INFORMATION ABOUT YOU PERSONALLY… **THAT IS WHAT BEING A PERSONAL BRAND MEANS!!!**

If you are a personal brand it's YOUR REAL FACE in the blog.

If you are a personal brand it's YOUR REAL FAMILY in the blog.

If you are a personal brand it's YOUR REAL HOUSE in the blog.

If you are a personal brand it's YOUR REAL CAR in the blog.

PERSONAL MEANS YOU ARE THE TOPIC!

PERSONAL BRAND YOU ARE THE BRAND!

Remember it's not a blog is it's not a diary of your daily life.

There is an awful people out there who try to scam people by calling content writing blogging. But content writing is NOT blogging.

Writing articles about niche topics is NOT blogging.

A blog is an online daily web log of your offline daily life. That is the definition of a blog.

And no AI can write your daily life for you.

And it's not a personal brand, if you are not the primary product before promoted.

EelKat-Wendy-C-Allen-PortCon2017-Quaraun-moon-elf-wizard-pink-necromancer.JPG
EelKat as Quaraun the Insane CosPlay PortCon 2016 Elf Wizard Pink Necromancer


Think about this: you are not the AI.

The AI is not YOU.

If you are using AI the blogs are NOT personal.

If the blogs are not personal, you are NOT a personal brand.

What you are talking about doing is not personal, not daily updates of your career, your life, your family, your hobbies, and so readers have no incentive to return each day. No incentive to become fans of you.

And without fans, you gain no followers.

Without followers, you do not gain brand recognition.

Without brand recognition, you do not become known as a personal brand.

If all your site is generic dime a dozen links to products, that does not build brand either, because why would anyone buy random products off some no name randos page when they could buy those same products from a store that they trust, like Amazon or Walmart?

Having AI help you write your personal experiences is one thing... Having AI spit out generic random crap is another thing entirely.

If there is nothing personal about your site, that's going to turn people away.

If you are going to be a personal brand, you need things you are known for. What color do you always wear? What phrase do you always say? What things do people think of when they hear your name?

When people hear my name, they think three things: pink, Elves, and Unicorns. What are the three things people think about when they hear YOUR name? However you answer that question, those 3 things are what you should be incorporating into your personal brand identity.

What do people think of when they hear Iris Apfel? Big round glasses. She made the huge, chunky round glasses she wore, her brand. Today at age 102 years old, she's also one of the world's top fashion eyeglasses fashion designer now, known for what? Designing the biggest, wildest, chunkier, mega huge round Eyewear out there. She did not start out as a designer of eye glasses. In the 1950s she was an interior decorator. But she wore those huge glasses, and those glasses became her brand, people could never remember her name, but they always remembered her glasses and they'd say “hey, you remember that fashion designer from the 1950s, the woman with the big round glasses, you know the one they designed the Incredibles character to look like?” Her huge glasses became so much a part of her brand, that she switched from interior decorating to designing fashion eyeglasses.

Iris Apfel is a perfect example of a personal brand. A woman who took a single detail about herself (her huge round glasses), ran with it, made it the central focus of her personal brand, and now there isn't anyone on the planet who hasn't at least heard of “that fashion designer with the big round glasses”, even if they don't know her name or anything else about her.

Now think about your AI blog.

Is that REALLY what you want your personal brand to be known for? Do you want people to know you as “That blogger who uses AI”. Think about it.

Unless you use AI to do something insanely original and extremely unique, no one is going to respect you enough to follow your blog.

If you want to be a personal brand, you NEED to be writing about YOURSELF. No AI can do that for you, because no AI knows who YOU are on a deeply personal level.

Hope this helps you out. Good luck with your project!