I’m being interviewed over at Rachel Firasek’s blog today. Me! I’m marking this day on the calendar for sure. However, before sending you over there, I wanted to share with you some thoughts about this “branding” thing authors have to keep in mind now.
Yesterday, Roni Loren (my friend from RWA and Twitter) posted an interesting article at Sierra Godfrey’s blog (another Twitter friend—No, I don’t live on Twitter, why do you ask?) about creating an author brand. She said:
[T]the only way to create an effective brand [is] to be genuinely yourself. People want to get to know YOU, the person.
And that’s absolutely true. However, we’re all made of multiple facets—spouse/ parent/sibling/child/boss/employee/friend/customer. Like the characters in books, we wear masks, showing only parts of our personality. We act differently at work than at home, or whether we’re with our close friends or distant relatives. Yet those masks are all genuinely us.
We’re constantly choosing which aspects of ourselves to reveal with everything we do. Those choices shape others’ impressions of us. And in the case of authors (or others who have a public persona that is effectively a business) those choices shape others’ impressions of our brand.
The more conscious you become of these decisions and the more you pay attention to what you’re putting out in the world, the more you control your brand. Every blog post or comment, every Facebook status update, and every tweet tells others what’s important to us and how we think.
This concept was high in my thoughts recently as I prepared my guest post for Rachel. I’m a very private person, so I don’t give details about my family or day job online. But as an author, I’m expected to be a “public” person. How can I balance those aspects?
When Rachel asked to interview me for her blog, my first reaction was “why me?” After all, I’m not yet published. I don’t even have an agent. My second reaction was “what the heck am I going to say?” It ended up being good practice for how to be (hopefully) interesting while still keeping things in line with my comfort factor. You’ll be the judge of how well I did.
Now you can go check out my interview over at Rachel Firasek’s blog…but don’t forget to come back to comment here. And come back here on Thursday for Part Two.
Do you consciously pay attention to your online activities and how they might affect your brand? Do you think you should? Or is that too much work for you?
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