Modern Author Showcase

Creating Your On-line Persona

You might think that as authors, we don’t care too much about "creating a persona." You might say, "I am what I am," Right? I’m an author. I’m allowed to be eccentric. Heck, it’s even expected of me.

Yet anyone over the age of four knows the importance of making a good impression on others. We all worry about it, whether it is on a conscious level or not. I recall once being at a large convention with a throng of SF fans and authors. The authors all got on a bus to go to a nearby event, and as we took our seats, I noticed that everyone breathed a sigh of relief at once. We no longer felt that we needed to be witty, to entertain our audience, or do anything but relax for a few minutes.

The way that you behave in public can have a tremendous influence on sales. If you don’t believe that, here’s a quote from a blog by Samhain Publishing: "Each time we make an offer on a manuscript, we’re not just looking at the manuscript quality. It’s so much more than the book. We look at you as an author. You have to sell us the whole package. And if part of that package is a terribly rude online persona, we may decide to pass on your book. An unprofessional persona will reflect poorly on Samhain Publishing. It will also result in lower book sales, which affects us too, since we get paid based on how many books you sell. If you don’t sell because you’re abrasive and insulting, we don’t make any money."

But your professional image follows you everywhere.

I often tell authors that one way to get published is to go to conventions and meet editors. When you go to meet them, try to dress and groom decently, make eye contact, carry on a normal intelligent conversation for a bit, and then let them know that you have a novel. Usually, if you’re just an average person, the editor will say, "Sure, send it to me."

Similarly, most of us as authors want to put on a fairly professional face online. As Ami Chopine put it, "This is my professional face, not my mommy blog. Sometimes I may post things regarding family, but this isn’t the place for cute kid stories or pics. Once again, because it is my professional face I never post disparaging remarks about anyone I know personally or professionally. I never express frustration about any part of the publishing process that doesn’t involve my own shortcomings. If I talk about my own shortcomings, it is about how I can overcome them."

I think that all of these kinds of things might be appropriate on your web site. But some authors can take things too far. For example, I have one friend who is convinced that Obama is going to destroy the world. His fears seem . . . well, just too far out there, and I’m a bit tired of hearing his paranoid rants. So I tune out his negative rhetoric.

As Carolyn Nicita put it, "Negative things are often more popular because people like a scandal, because it is a little story with its own little problem that pulls at people’s curiosity. Still, the small payback in a bit of audience is not worth garnering the ill will of your publisher or hurting friends and family. If you want to write a story for an audience looking for scandal, make it fiction."

Many authors use humor in an effort to entertain. I’ve heard from several of you that Patrick Rothfus is doing that well. As one person said, "His jokes are usually funny on at least three different levels and disturbing on another."

Similarly, authors are sometimes tempted to resort to humor that is crude or inappropriate. Jay Lake tells in one of his blogs how he won a major award at work, and a co-worker afterward went into his bosses’ office and delivered a printout from one of Jay’s blogs that had some jokes dealing with masturbation and whatnot. Although the co-worker wasn’t successful in sabotaging Jay’s career, thankfully, it does make me wonder about what kinds of jokes I might want to tell online. Certainly, I wouldn’t want to offend any of my readers.

Every once in awhile, as an author, you’ll hear that someone is trying to sabotage your career by telling ugly stories about you. Personally, I try to avoid handing anyone ammunition, and I think that such ammunition might fall into any number of categories: embarrassing things that I might have done, stupid things I’ve said, deeply personal stories, and so on.