So you’ve written a book and now it’s time to say something nice about yourself.
Quelle horreur!!!
Most people have been taught not to say good things about themselves (because it’s socially considered self-centered bragging) or have been trained to actively say bad things about themselves (because of emotional abuse).
If you’re neurodivergent, trying to market yourself comes up against a lot of additional resistance.
“I don’t care who the author is—I just like the entertainment that I like—so why should I market myself? Nobody cares.”
“I don’t see myself as professional, charming, or entertaining and I don’t want to lie to readers.”
“Other people are better writers than I am, so why bother?”
At any rate, marketing ourselves can be stressful—even if you do have a healthy ego.
Product vs. Service
I’ve been struggling with marketing myself, too, even though I’ve worked as a marketer professionally. But marketing yourself is waaaaay different from marketing a product or service for a business.
I’ve also struggled with marketing books as such. When I started out, I tried to market books as products. You know how you market products? By focusing on how the product will benefit the user.
But a book isn’t the same as a new camera lens.
With a camera lens, you can say stuff like, “People will admire the photos you take with the SuperShot 2000 Lens!”
On the other hand, trying to sell a book by saying, “You’ll be distracted from your boring and/or stressful life!” doesn’t really work.
Eventually I hit a moment of inspiration. I don’t really sell books. I’m selling stories.
A story is a service; the service is how the story makes readers feel. A story is more like a spa day than it’s like a camera lens. You’re selling the experience of reading and enjoying the story.
Reframing how I think about stories helped a lot.
I now try to focus less on the plot and more on the vibe when I’m describing stories: if I’m writing an over-the-top sci-fi extravaganza, I don’t belabor how the extravaganza is gonna play out. I just mention details that support excessiveness, science-fictiony-ness, and spectacularness.
Plot? Whatevah. Give me the setup of the story and shhhh…
Writer vs. Author
Thinking about stories as services helps…with marketing stories. But what about marketing stuff related to you?!?
Let’s walk through this.
Let’s start by examining what you means in a marketing context, and stipulate that you, the person who writes the story, is not the same you who appears in marketing text.
The person who writes the story is complex. A human being.
But when you market your fiction, you’re not marketing the complex human being who wrote the story—not exactly—just as a spa business isn’t the same as the collection of people working at the spa, plus all the details about the location and services.
I’m gonna call the you that writes the writer.
I’m gonna call the you that gets marketed the author.
Metaphorically, the writer is the person doing all the spa services, and the author is the business.
You are not marketing you.
You are marketing a business whose name might be the same as yours. (Unless you’re using a pen name.)
Writing About Your Author Business
How do you describe your author business, then? Without misleading people? Without bragging? Without saying something that will get you punished online? (There are definitely people who like to lash out at authors.)
How can you ensure that readers are interested in your stories in general?
Describe your author-self (that is, your author business) in terms of what your readers are likely to get out of reading your books. You’re not selling you. You’re marketing the experience of reading your books.
Some important elements here:
- Readers want to know that they can trust the author.
- Readers want to know what kind of stories to expect.
- Readers want to know how they will feel while reading these stories.
Readers do not expect a 100% money-back guarantee from a story. Usually. What they expect is 80% or better.
80% trustworthy, 80% general story categories, 80% feels.
Readers aren’t looking for perfection, just as you wouldn’t expect any given service to be the best service you’ve ever had. You want the service to do what it says it’s gonna do at a competent level. Anything higher than that is a bonus.
Also, just as a word of advice that I often ignore (but maybe shouldn’t): don’t use “be” verbs or “have” verbs in your writing. Use strong verbs instead.
Trusting the Author
What makes you trustworthy as an author? It depends.
Let’s say you’re a bestselling author. That’s pretty trustworthy: a large number of people have bought your books, perhaps even more than one.
Or let’s say you write about something that you’re associated with professionally, like being a medical doctor who writes medical thrillers. Also pretty trustworthy.
How about if you’ve written multiple books? Most people never write a book at all; writing multiple books is a sign of dogged determination, if nothing else. That’s trustworthy, or at least reliable.
But what if you’re writing your first book and you a) don’t feel trustworthy or b) can’t think of anything relevant?
Why do people trust or rely upon you generally?
Let’s say you’re a single mother of three and all three of them regularly get their homework done. Or you’re a lifelong volunteer for thankless tasks. A retired Marine. A dedicated fanfic writer (this counts!). A project manager. Someone who can admit they’re wrong in a timely fashion, even.
Use whatever makes you trusted, reliable, or an expert, and point it at your story. (Or stories.)
Whenever a stray cat meows in hunger, Maria Kimura leaps into action, providing immediate food, warmth, and shelter—followed by a visit to the local vet for shots, neutering, and a forever home. Her rescues now lollygag lazily inside a hundred different homes. Find her first mystery novel, REAL CATS DON’T GET CAUGHT, at www.mariakimura.com.
What Stories to Expect
How can you tell readers what kind of stories to expect? Especially if you write in multiple genres? It depends.
This time, it doesn’t depend on what makes you trustworthy. It depends on who you are and what you habitually do, that is, not any particular task or hobby so much as what patterns of things show up across a lot of what you do.
Do you like crossword puzzles, keeping track of neighborhood gossip and/or sitting on your HOA board to make sure nobody violates procedures, and maintaining extensive collections of seasonal decorations, all perfectly packed and maintained? Congratulations, you might just be detail-oriented and responsible.
Are you an LGBTQIA+ daydreamer and fanfiction writer who is constantly dissatisfied with the canonical endings of stories and always making up your own? Do you connect with people over your shared appreciation of the same fandoms? Congratulations, you might just be inventive and a fan of queer fiction.
Is your humor so dry that most people miss it, and the people who do get it roll their eyes in disgust because they get the pun but didn’t come up with it first? Are you constantly correcting people for using words or figures of speech incorrectly? In an online argument with an idiot, are you the person who listens calmly and carefully, then delivers the cutting blow? Congratulations, you might just be analytical and full of dry wit.
You can give the readers evocative words to help describe you and/or you can illustrate the patterns.
- Queer and inventive: Jeff Neff can gay if he wants to. He can gay your friend’s behind. But your friends won’t gay and if they don’t gay, it’s fine. Looking for inventive, wicked queer riffs on pop culture tropes? Take a chance at www.jeffneff.com.
- Dry wit and adventure: Although he once destroyed a punslinger at ten paces after the man insulted his mother and his dog, Drake Johnson only uses as much humor as his audience can handle and never matches wits with an unarmed opponent. Read his latest novel,THE DREAD PIRATE BOB RUST, at www.drakejohnson.com.
How the Reader Will Feel
How are you supposed to know how the reader will feel while reading your stories?
A lot of writers will indulge in some mental gymnastics here: because they cannot be sure of how a particular reader will feel while reading their stories, they tell themselves that they cannot know how readers will generally feel while reading their stories.
That’s like saying you can’t predict the likely outcome of an election because you can’t predict how individual voters will vote.
Nah.
Let’s go out on a limb here and say that you write stories you would like to read.
Maybe not your very favorite stories ever, and maybe you don’t feel like you’re doing all that well at the stories you do write. That’s fine. But if you hated that kind of story, you wouldn’t regularly write it for fun and profit. (You might feel like you’re locked into finishing a series long after you’re interested in it, but that’s a separate issue.)
Your tastes affect the stories you write.
In other words, what you like is probably what you write.
So think about your favorite authors. Maybe ascribe the same feelings to your readers that you feel about your favorite authors.
One of my favorite authors is Sir Terry Pratchett; he’s smart and insightful and observant and angry at injustice yet still kind. Although it does indeed give me a visceral reaction to think of describing myself the same way I describe Sir Terry, I’m not describing my books’ resemblance to his. I’m merely describing emotions.
And it’s not complete b.s. to say that reading my work gives my readers—the ones who really get my work, that is—the feeling of being smart and insightful and observant and angry at injustice yet still kind.
Thing is, I do write about POV characters who are smart and insightful and observant and angry at injustice yet who are still kind. Not always, but often. And the longer I write, the more I write characters like that. I like spending time with ’em.
The characters apply their traits to the stories they’re in.
That means the readers are inside the experiences of characters who have those traits.
That means the readers, all things considered, will tend to experience what it’s like to be those characters. Or at least what it’s like to spend time around those characters.
DeAnna Knippling pens stories where intelligence and insight matter…but where the sword of anger at injustice never shatters her copious inkwells of hope and compassion. Read more at www.wonderlandpress.com.
If it feels intimidating to describe your very favorite author, maybe try three of them and mix’n’match the ideas that feel the most accurate among the three.
Wrapping it All Together
How can you tie all of this together? Here’s your recipe:
- Identify what the reader wants to know about you as an author.
- Readers want to know that they can trust the author. (Betty Blake, a fictional author who has written 5 romance novels, read 5000 since age of 12.)
- Readers want to know what kind of stories to expect. (Single mom, reputation as disorganized on the surface but always shows up to support people when stuff goes wrong.)
- Readers want to know how they will feel while reading these stories. (Betty loves Romancing the Stone, the best enemies-to-lovers story ever created: funny, sarcastic, and full of action that keeps forcing the characters to choose each other!)
- Rephrase what the reader wants to know into a description of your author persona, using evocative words and/or an illustrative example.
- Change “a fictional author who has written 5 romance novels, read 5000 since age of 12” to “With five novels written and over 5000 romance novels read since Betty Blake turned twelve, she is an experienced romance fan and writer who knows her secret babies from her babies ever after.”
- Change “Single mom, reputation as disorganized on the surface but always shows up to support people when stuff goes wrong” to “Some people say Betty lacks focus but she’s a master of planning…or at least rescuing the moment after everything has gone wrong.”
- Change “Betty loves Romancing the Stone, the best enemies-to-lovers story ever created: funny, sarcastic, and full of action that keeps forcing the characters to choose each other!” to “Betty’s stories are funny, sarcastic, and full of action that keeps forcing the characters to choose each other!”
- Rephrase the description of your author persona so it has strong damn verbs and is in third person.
- Change “With five novels written and over 5000 romance novels read since Betty Blake turned twelve, she is an experienced romance fan and writer who knows her secret babies from her babies ever after” to “With five novels written and over 5000 romance novels read since she turned twelve, Betty Blake knows her secret babies from her babies ever after.”
- Change “Some people say Betty lacks focus but she’s a master of planning…or at least rescuing the moment after everything has gone wrong” to “Betty long ago mastered the art of Betty-Fu: the art of seeming disorganized but making things magically better when other people’s ‘organization’ falls to pieces.”
- Change “Betty’s stories are funny, sarcastic, and full of action that keeps forcing the characters to choose each other!” to “Betty drives her characters to distraction with fast-paced action, so fast they never notice falling for each other behind the sarcasm and snark.”
- Stick it all together and see if there’s anything you can combine or shorten.
With five novels written and over 5000 romance novels read since she turned twelve, Betty Blake knows her secret babies from her babies ever after. As a single mother of three, she long ago mastered the art of Betty-Fu: the art of seeming disorganized but making things magically better when other people’s “organization” falls to pieces. Betty drives her characters to distraction with fast-paced action, so fast they never notice falling for each other behind all the sarcasm and snark. Get hooked on her novels at www.bettyblake.com.
Ehhh…I like it. I’m gonna just leave it alone.
It’s Not About You
The main thing to remember about marketing yourself as an author is that it’s not about you.
It’s about what delights your reader.
Your author persona is connected to you…but it’s not the whole you. Only the parts that are applicable and delightful for your readers.
Your author persona is the umbrella for all your books. It is everything that your books have in common with each other. Obviously the books are all written by you…but you’re writing fiction, not a complete, dull, exceedingly accurate autobiography.
Your author persona is just the collection of traits that happen to be in your work, gathered together as a sort of marketing character (that is, a persona).
In short, you’re not writing about you, you’re secretly writing about what your readers love.
Even if you don’t feel connected to or authentic with that yet.
…
Find more Wonderland Press writing and marketing resources here.
