Lucas Conley deals with the irony of ironies, turning yourself into a franchise.

Question: How do you brand an anti-branding book?

Lucas Conley: Well, part of the irony of this whole thing is... of getting a book out there is that everybody talks about your brand and everybody talks about branding yourself and having your web site and having a blog and getting out there on the speaking circuit even just- even just in terms of search engine optimization. When you start to talk to people who get in to that the owning of certain words like my name or the title of the book, you want those results to come up quickly when people search for you, and that’s made me hyperconscious of everything that I’ve done to promote the book because I want it to be authentic. I want to be genuine with people about the book and genuine with the level of interest that I find out there as opposed to trying to hype it, which is something that happens so easily in the business book world ‘cause you’ll find authors willing to kind of become brands like a Tony Robbins or some of these very big characters in the business book world or a Seth Godin can kind of create a product of themselves, and I’m not interested in doing that. I’m interested in writing a book and writing another interesting book after this one as opposed to turning this into some kind of franchise for myself or turning myself into a franchise.

Recorded on: 7/23/08