An Authors Persona

posted in: News, Writing | 0

 

Hi everybody, sorry the post is a bit late, a case of life getting in the way.

I’m back with a post regarding your public appearance as an author, primarily concerning your online profiles. I’m going to give you my top three tips on how to be as professional as you can be when marketing online.

 

1. So firstly, as tempting as it might be, try not to have too many powerful opinions. Now, obviously there will be things you feel strongly about and causes you will offer your support to, but that doesn’t mean that at the next election or over an event weekend you should make all your opinions publicly clear. It can alienate readers and convince people that you aren’t worth listening to, or can have people citing you as a source for something you may not know enough about to properly talk about. When writing stories and self-publishing a hugely important thing to do is to make sure that your audience doesn’t feel like you’re coming from a place that they can’t understand.

 

2. Now, a lot of people make this mistake but you shouldn’t put yourself on a pedestal. By this I don’t mean you shouldn’t have confidence – you totally should. Your work is awesome and letting people know is the only way they’ll ever find that out. That said, however, lots of black and white pictures of yourself, combined with a tendency to ignore your audiences contribution on your social media and a too flippant attitude can quickly make you appear pretty cold-hearted. Sure, it might be a lot of work to keep up conversations with people all the time, but if you want to sell your books to people you’ll have to do it, so you might as well find a way to enjoy doing it.

 

3. Finally, most importantly, you should always remember what makes you an author (Hint: It’s the readers). If you’re going to spend a lot of time building an online persona, make sure to take the time for individuals here and there and to offer fun alternative ways your audience can get more involved. One example of this is “Andorra Pett and the Oort Cloud Café”, a book I am responsible for, and as a part of putting it together, I offered my readers the opportunity to be beta readers for me. Naturally, people enjoyed the opportunity to get involved and be a part of the pre-release process and an even better part of the deal was that I got great feedback on my work, early. Getting people involved was a win-win.

 

So don’t even feel like your online profile isn’t hip enough. You’ll connect with people best by being yourself, and by finding points of interest between your readers and yourself.

Hopefully, that will help you, and I appreciate you coming here to read again.

Have a great day, and we’ll see you here again soon

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