Last week, reader Dan Cooper tipped me off to the fact that Scrivener, a program I was saying sounded good for screenwriters, is actually B.S. We emailed a few times and just in the course of conversation he sent me the following mini-tutorial on personal branding. I thought it's good advice for any writer and asked him to share it. By the way, if you are wondering just who the hell Dan Cooper is and why we should be listening to him, according to the bio I'm lifting from his site, Dan Cooper was a key member of the original 5-man launch team of the Fox News Channel and that Dan originated the "team coverage" concept in news broadcasting, and played an instrumental role in the early success of ABC's "20/20".

As a writer, you must view yourself as a brand, your work a product, and you've got to use marketing strategy to build your brand and achieve success.

This in no way conflicts with your truth. All successful artists are brands.

What is a brand? It is a set of differentiating characteristics. To understand this, let's look at automobile brands. Each brand is followed by its primary differentiating characteristic:

BMW is the driving brand -- BMW is the ultimate driving experience.

Mercedes owns engineering. They are always at the forefront, and they use the word engineering in their advertising, as BMW does driving.

Audi owns design. Porsche owns sports car.

Toyota and Honda both own reliability, which is a problem for both of them, but both do well because reliability is a key factor running through all car buying decisions. These are the safe choice cars.

Let's get back to writing.

Claire, you have a wonderful writing voice. Now is the time to develop your brand and market it. Marketing yourself now means working toward finding your unique differentiating factor as a writer. We know that best-selling authors as well as "literary" writers are well-branded (David Sedaris is the funny gay writer. Steven King is the best horror writer. Ken Auletta is the top media writer. Ian McEwan is the best English writer, while Martin Amis is the "bad boy" English writer. Ann Coulter is the conservative monster). This kind of differentiating is not like being a science writer or celebrity writer. it's built on what differentiates you from everybody else on the shelf.

I very strongly recommend reading Differentiate or Die by Jack Trout, an old friend of mine, and the world's most important marketing guru site

For decades I have created TV shows and production elements based on Jack's theories. When I worked for Fox News, for example, Roger Ailes highly differentiated his product with the "fair and balanced" slogan. In marketing terms, Fox has repositioned the rest of the press as liberal. Perception is always what sells, not reality.

Finally, when you examine your level of comfort with publicity, you must determine that you will indeed always be quoted, always maneuver for publicity. When someone asks who you are, don't say "a writer". You've got to give them your differentiating position. Developing your differentiating characteristic is hard, and you have to deliver on it, but it's the way to reach the largest audience and establish financial security in a difficult field.