Your Public Persona (Do You Need One?)

This last week I unveiled a new cover for Petals and Thorns, which was my very first erotic romance, first published back in 2010.

It came out with Loose ID at first, then I got the rights back after two years and I self-published it. When an author does that, she has to get a new cover as the rights for that stay with the original publisher. That's the cover to the left. And yes, I used the pen name "Jennifer Paris" on that, which I abandoned and never used again.

Her Facebook page still gets likes, however, which I find both boggling and instructive.

I liked the cover I self-published it with just fine. It got nominated for some best cover contests, which means it's a perfectly fine cover, but I never felt like it WORKED all that well. I'm not sure why.

Thus the reboot. Because a cover is important. Vitally so.

Yes, yes - we can all point to the adage to never judge a book by its cover, but the fact that it is cliché points to our very human tendency to do exactly that. We are visual creatures and are hardwired to make decisions based on what we see. We're also culturally trained to read in certain cues from images. Particularly as readers, we assimilate all sorts of cues about what a story will deliver from a cover.

Which leads me to the topic at hand, whether authors need a public persona.

Yes.

Oh. My. God. YES.

And it amazes me just how many authors don't seem to get this.

What's key to remember is that, for an author, our brand is not our product. We write many books over the course of our careers (we hope!). Very likely we'll write in multiple genres. The one consistency is ourselves. The brand is us, who we are.

Thus our public persona is essentially our personal book cover.

It needs to be attractive, enticing, give hints about what kinds of stories it will deliver. And it needs to be not obnoxious.

In kind of a funny coincidence, I was chatting over email with a friend yesterday about a couple of authors we both know who have been abrasive on author loops. Spamming with promo on email loops with specific rules forbidding that. Complaining on forums about other professionals in the community. All with the combined effect of making us not like them very much - which means we're disinclined to help them when they ask for it.

What's that you say? That's not a public persona?

Think again. I'd argue that any time we step online, just as any time we leave our homes, our faces are exposed to the public eye. The internet has made the world small in both wonderful and scary ways. How we appear to be echoes out in endless ripples.

It pays to make sure that face is the one you want people to see.

Trolling the Trolls

So there's a brilliant flowchart. Drawn by someone who actually knows how to draw flowcharts. I can just leave it here to address the topic of trolls. Sure. He's addressing reading your Amazon reviews, but it's all the same, isn't it? You don't here the good ones. You only obsess over the mean, crappy ones. Thus, the decision tree for how to handle Amazon reviews (sub in trolls).

What? I shouldn't just leave that here and walk away? Dang. Okay. How about the Psychology Today article pointing out what the internet, even in infancy, knew about trolls all along? That they're narcissists, psychopaths, and sadists. Not that I'll claim the internet knew any such thing with the experimental and researched certainly that Psychology Today likely knows it - but who among us had been on the internet for more than an hour before being given the Second Rule of the Internet: Don't Feed the Trolls (the First Rule is: All Caps = Shouting = You're Making Yourself Look Bad). The interwebs, in its amassed unconscious wisdom, knew from the get go that the only way to deal with trolls was to starve them out. That by denying them sustenance, we'd be essentially trolling the trolls.

Trolls are all about themselves. No one else. It's all about them. Always has been. Always will be. Little dried up emotional vampires, they feed upon any and all reaction they can elicit from others. The danger to you is that this is how they multiply. Responding to trolls is the internet equivalent of getting a gremlin wet (and/or feeding them after midnight. Pick your poison.)

Trolls. Save your time and your energy for you. Don't feed the monsters.