How to Come Up With an Author Tagline

I know what you’re thinking. What’s an author tagline?

It’s that catchy phrase, that clever one-liner that helps readers identify you and that your publicist can use to help you develop your platform. Why do you need it? So you can have a focal point, a clear and concise foundation from which to build all of your marketing efforts.

The tagline is the heart of your message, the slogan for your author campaign, but coming up with one may take some trial and error. Before you can start developing your tagline, you first need to answer a few key questions:

• Who is your audience?
• What value do you bring them?
• Why should you be the one to bring them that value?

The answers to those three questions establish the guts of your platform. For the sake of developing an example, lets say your audience is thirty-something divorcees and that your expertise is helping them jump back into the dating scene. You are the best person to give them this advice because you are a matchmaker with a ninety percent success rate and you have just published a book that outlines your top dating tips and advice. From there, you can create a list of possible taglines:

• “Getting you back in the game”
• “Divorced, but not dead”
• “Second time’s a charm”

When developing your own tagline, you would want to make a list of more than three, and even mix and match parts of several to come up with a phrase that is both short and catchy. Though not related to an author platform, here are a few tag lines that work well:

• “Funny name, serious sandwich” —Schlotzky’s Deli
• “Just do it” —Nike
• “Think outside the box” —Apple
• “The Uncola” —7up
• “Life Unscripted” —TLC

You get a sense of what each company is about based on the tagline. Each company’s brand springs forth from their tagline and all of their marketing efforts work to perpetuate the idea established by their tagline.  Keep that in mind when developing your own tagline.

Also, you don’t want to rush the process. Take your time. Bounce ideas off several people whose opinion you trust.  Sleep on it a few nights to make sure it’s something you can live with. It’s much more difficult to switch paddles midstream than it is to start with the right equipment in the first place. So, once you commit to a tagline, stick with it and make sure your outreach efforts and all of your marketing stays consistent with your message.