Selling the Author

[Madman Starryteller]

It is sometimes expected that you reveal a lot about yourself alongside your text work. Who you are becomes as important as your work. It's been said that as we market our books, we should also market ourselves.

What are your thoughts about that? Do you have a marketable author profile? Do you prefer to stay anonymous? Mystery might even make you more interesting?

For me it's a bit difficult. I have a flawed past and I am flawed now as well. In one way I want to stay anonymous because I fear people will care about my past and my journey perhaps even more than my work. I want my work to be the focus, not me.

Do you want to separate the author from the writing? It might be hard since we write based on ourselves and how we see reality.

How do you feel about selling yourself in this sense?

 

[JT Woody]

I try to leave myself out of my x/twitter postings (thats the only author site i have).
I dont see it as relevant to the product i am selling. Sure it makes you more relatable, but i can be relatable with how i interact with people. But i choose not to tweet about my life.

 

[CatrionaGrace]

No need to share intimate details of one's life, but readers are curious about a writer's connection to his or her work. One can talk about inspiration, writing philosophy, and how one's background and taste in literature affected choice of location and genre. If I had a nickle for every time someone asked if my book is based on personal experience, I'd have quite a nice little stack of coins by now. The answer is no, I am not my character and she is not me, but I shared some of my experiences and memories with her. Example: my father once picked a flower for me from the biggest magnolia tree in Arkansas. I put that in the book. Little things make readers happy.

How many photos of the book cover and summaries of the plot can one put on social media before people stop bothering to look at it? I include things like photographs of the aforementioned magnolia and the bayou that inspired a location in the book. There are also photos of people at book signings or holding my book, including a perfectly lovely set of photos of Writer JT Woody peeking over the cover. You got plenty of s, my dear. Thanks!

 

[Set2Stun]

Do you want to separate the author from the writing?

Yes, absolutely. I'd much rather remain completely anonymous and have readers only care about my writing, and nothing else. But unforch, that's not how things work.

If I were a super-fascinating, engaging genius with movie star looks, yeah, I would be pushing myself as the selling point for my work. Alas, I'm just a simple farmer, and am not all that interesting. I just don't have that "zazz" that would immediately draw in members of a possible audience. And I know I can't change that, and I'm never going to try.

All that being said, I've since accepted that social media engagement is necessary. I didn't want to, but I created a website, a Facebook account, and a Twitter account, and then launched my book into the ether. Oops - not a lot of people cared, because I had no followings on those platforms. No one to get a copy and spread the word through their own networks. It was just me, a nobody on the internet with zero influence, posting about a book I'd released. And why would random people care about that? A title and cover can only get you so far.

So, I've been working on correcting that, albeit belatedly. I'm regularly writing a blog, even if only a handful of people are reading it at best, and I've started actively engaging with the writing community on Twitter (though it seems to be chock full of frauds, phonies, bots, and solicitors). Whether these efforts will reap any benefits in the future remains to be seen, but I can tell you that doing nothing doesn't do anything for ya.