Writers should be read—but neither seen nor heard. – Daphne du Maurier
When I decided two years ago to write seriously for publication (as opposed to writing literary stories that few, if anyone, would ever read), I discovered that a notable chunk of my already limited writing time would necessarily divert to advertising and promotion. Anyone who writes fiction understands that this is not a happy discovery. In fact, a better description might be that this is a horrifying discovery. The complex reasons for such a response primarily relate to the opposing natures of the two activities.
Generally, people who write need extended hours alone, beyond the reach of everyone else in the world. Novelists actually prefer spending time with artificially constructed characters over the company of real human beings. Living creatures, especially people, make demands on us that drain our limited supply of physical, mental and emotional energy. We tend to be deeply private as a result. We were that quiet kid in school who never spoke in class (unless we were moved to correct the teacher: “Um, Mr. U? Not is an adverb, not an adjective. Certainly, we can check the dictionary, if you want to argue the point, but I am quite certain it.”).
Fiction writers tend to be introverts, individuals who become exhausted when interacting with other people, especially in large groups and over long periods of time, so we conserve energy by limiting interaction with other people, at least in the real world. Oh, sure, there exists that exception to the rule, that extroverted author who is the life of every party, but this rare animal tends to gravitate towards writing shorter texts like news articles, essays and nonfiction books, texts which require daily interaction and communication with other people. These writers love interviewing people, going on ride-a-longs, trekking into the jungles of South East Asia, and collecting first-hand data before compiling it into a synthesized book.
Novelists, on the other hand, writers who retreat into empty rooms (even separate houses) and into private fictional worlds for extended periods of time—writers who prefer to conduct research by reading other books and documents by themselves, thank you very much—limit their interactions with other people to what is only absolutely necessary. They only venture out of their writing caves or the local library because they aren’t quite capturing the authenticity of a setting in a scene they are writing so they need the physical experience. But like Wordsworth, who often referred to his sister’s journals while writing his poetry, we’re as happy using someone else’s notes for information as our own. After all, we build whole worlds out of words on a page. Words are our worlds.
Requiring novelists to venture out from the dark and to create public personas beyond the author blip on the back of our books runs akin to tying us up naked in front of a crowd armed with whips and rotten tomatoes.
So, finding out that I would have todevelop a highly visible “web” presence if I wanted to actually sell the books I wrote…well…that created a bit of a personal crisis for me, especially when I learned the scope and depth of that presence.
I discovered that I should maintain a professional website where I post regular blogs, as well as a Twitter account, a Facebook account, a LinkedIn account, a Goodreads account, maybe even accounts with Pinterest and Instagram. When I started, I didn’t even know what the last two were, and truthfully, I’ve made little use of them. Initially, Twitter terrified me—I envisioned it as a scene requiring one to post hip, pithy, even witty, repartee designed to dazzle and attract. Just ask my husband and he’ll tell you that I am not funny. And writing blogs, which are essentially essays expressing my opinion about stuff, doesn’t sound private at all. How does a writer express the personal opinions of her author persona while keeping her true self hidden in the background?
Clueless, I searched out and studied what other romance writers were doing. I surfed web pages and social media accounts of authors whose work I admired and whose books I read regularly. I created a Facebook account and friended a few authors. To my amazement, they friended me back. Well, most of them anyway. As a reader, I confess to the thrill of becoming social network “friends” with the writers of books that I treasure. Underneath my quiet author self, I really am a geeky fan.
For a month or so, I also read a lot of author blogs. I “friended” publishing types on LinkedIn. I observed in order to find out what promotional success looked like so I could replicate it myself. As is often the case, I found that other authors’ failures were as instructive as their successes.
For example, I realized lots of author posts limited themselves solely to self-promotion. Every tweet announced their new book ad infinitum, every FB post featured a picture of their new release and links to a site where readers could buy, buy, BUY! Only a few authors seem to balance that kind of self-promotion with personal touches that make them seem interesting.
My favorite social media moments were when I connected with authors or bloggers personally over shared enjoyment of a musical group, a television show or another author’s book. I especially love talking details about good books because I am a reader first, then a writer. Finding out that I’ve discovered a new-to-me author at the same time as another writer excites me. It’s also an opportunity to tell these writers how much I enjoy their work.
In my research, I also read a ton of tedious, boring blog posts. Blog posts that check off that promotional list of having a monthly blog post. Yeah. Just like the paper a student writes for English class because the teacher assigned an essay. Or the posts that passed themselves off as blogs but were just more ads for the writer’s books. After dismissing the buy! Buy! BUY! blog posts, I trudged through the ones that limited themselves to safe topics like family recipes or cleaning tips. Why would I go to an erotic romance author’s web site for tips on how to get rid of ants?
Few writers—many who are damned fine novelists—actually maintain interesting, well-written blogs. So why bother to write them in the first place. Because writers are told that it’s the thing to do?
I didn’t want to write safe, vacuous blogs that would bore me to write just like they’d bore people to read. I didn’t want to post ad after ad for my books. Plus, if I wrote boring comments on FB and Twitter, and boring blogs on my website, how would that entice anyone to buy a book that threatened to be just as boring as my take on fill-in-the-blank-safe-topic-blog-post?
There was a reason we writer-types rarely spoke up in school. Real people are mean and not easily killed off in a book. Remember that whole staked naked in front of whip-carrying crowds image? That was a regular nightmare I had while in high school.
Here’s the deal: going public inevitably means setting oneself up as a giant target for every critical, pissed off, overly sensitive, potential sociopath with Internet access. Or, at least, that’s the way it feels for a sensitive, private introvert like me. Probably, fear is the underlying cause of most authors’ anxieties about being online and available to readers and the public in general. Isn’t it enough that we put our precious stories up for all to see?
When creating an author persona, smart writers put their best foot forward and leave their pissy, sour self offline. Authors with a tendency to post negative, self-pitying comments get dumped from my FB network, and I imagine that’s true for most readers, i.e. most FB “friends”. Post about one bad day, once in a while? Insight into the real person behind the persona. Not an issue. But daily over-dramatized and emotionally-charged commentary gets one the boot from everyone’s feed. We’re all battling some challenge in our personal and professional lives, but Twitter and FB are not the place to vent it. That’s what therapists are for. To become one of these individuals is to serve as a black hole on most people’s online social networks. A black hole that blips out of existence in the blink of a click: unfriend.
It seems like keeping one’s web presence upbeat should be easy, but that is to oversimplify things. Being simultaneously interesting and noncontroversial is antithetical.
In their attempts to stay positive, I’ve also noticed that many authors make the mistake of developing Pollyanna personas. They come across as chirpy, ever-cheerful and, yawn-inducingly bland. Hence the fallback position of posting man-candy, cat photos, and shots of sunsets.
Slinking carefully through the landmine-filled landscape of social media, authors have to constantly strive for a balance between self-promotion and interesting, positive self-revelation. Authors use pseudonyms because the public persona they create isn’t exactly who they are, but neither is it someone completely fabricated.
The made-up part is easy to make nice. I especially admire author Lisa Marie Rice’s candid and cheeky online author description:
“Lisa Marie Rice is eternally 30 years old and will never age. She is tall and willowy and beautiful. Men drop at her feet like ripe pears. She has won every major book prize in the world. She is a black belt with advanced degrees in archaeology, nuclear physics, and Tibetan literature. She is a concert pianist. Did I mention her Nobel Prize? Of course, Lisa Marie Rice is a virtual woman and exists only at the keyboard when writing erotic romance. She disappears when the monitor winks off.”
Amusing, this description also draws a clear line in the sand between this author’s private and the public selves. Rice is not going to reveal much if anything about who she is as the writer behind the author persona. Unsurprisingly, Rice’s blogs are mere reposts of ads for her books. I read her books (one of my favorite all-time romances is Midnight Man), but I never—to quote Tayor Swift–drop by her author site to read her posts, like ever. And I am not funny enough to substitute humor with substance.
Under a writer’s invented public persona, a real woman (or man) exists. And she has opinions—sometimes controversial opinions—and what is a blog for, if not to express opinions? Revealing part of her true self means that the writer will be expressing some of those real opinions once in a while. At least, I hope so.
After reading a lot of dull but carefully-written entries on a variety of author websites, I wanted to bang my head against the wall. I would never follow those writers’ blogs because I have better things to do than read posts that say nothing. Unless I already love the writer’s fiction, I also probably won’t seek out her books. I find these “safe” blog posts as forgettable as the passing comments people make in lines at the grocery store. Writing a monthly blog so people will remember the author between releases only works if the writer actually writes something worth reading. Since the blog is an example of one’s writing style and personality, boring blog posts are unlikely to move me to spend my money on the writer’s books.
Yet, I’ve seen authors attacked again and again when they do express a real opinion about something important either on their blog, FB or Twitter.
A few months ago, one of my favorite romance authors, Christina Dodd, mildly called out the star of the upcoming STARZ series Outlander because of her attitude towards the romance genre. In an interview, Ms. Balfe made remarks which could be construed as a putdown on the romance genre. Unfortunately, the television series is based on the phenomenally successful romance novel series by Diana Gabaldon.
Dodd was immediately and harshly attacked and called all sorts of names by individuals who saw her post. These apparent Outlander fans foamed like rabid dogs at Dodd’s slight complaint, which I believe she posed as a thought-provoking question rather than a censorious critique of the young actor’s perspective. Rather than acknowledging the underlying bias in Balfe’s comments, these individuals reacted emotionally against Dodd. Ironically, their response against Dodd was considerably more vitriolic than Dodd’s original post. Personally, I think it was rather in bad taste for the actor about to be catapulted into fame—thanks to her casting in a series based on a romance novel—to badmouth that genre. Based on more recent interviews I’ve seen, I think she’s come to understand the problem of casting the story as something “more” than romance, and its implied slur suggesting that a romance is insufficient as a genre onto itself.
In another, recent controversial post, author Joanna Wylde wrote about problems with the new romance author street teams and their occasional (some would say frequent) bad behavior, especially concerning their attacks on bloggers who have given mediocre reviews for publications by the authors they champion. Again, speaking passionately and candidly about a topic that affects all of us in the community of romance books, Wylde risked becoming the target of negative online zealots and the individuals they sweep up into their emotional and vicious attacks.
Truthfully, I admire Wylde and Dodd, and I buy their books. Indie author Melissa Schroeder regularly thumbs her nose at individuals who take offense when she dares speak out and express a strong opinion on her social media sites. She’s tough and not afraid to be herself. Consequently, I find her writing interesting. The only writer whose blog I read religiously is Chuck Wendig. He’s not afraid to say interesting things. I envy the skill with which he handles the inevitable attacks volleyed his way. But I know that I won’t ever have skin as thick as his, nor be able to put people in their place as coolly and charismatically as he does. In some alternate universe, I hope I’m his female counterpart, but, I know myself well enough to face that it’s not happening on this plane of existence.
What I want to know is why can’t writers speak out and share their opinions like everyone else without the reactionary storm of hatred? I mean, how dang powerful are romance writers in the world? The fact that they can’t seem to express themselves without someone finding fault, without someone magnifying their comments into the stratosphere of the deeply offensive is, well, strange to me. Why even befriend a writer on Goodreads or on Facebook if we don’t hope to know them on a level deeper than the author description at the end of a book or Amazon author page? Why read their blogs at all?
True. Writers like Rice with her heavily cloaked persona will never offend anyone. But readers will also never know who she is or what she cares about. We’ll never share a joke with her on Twitter, or chat about our favorite episode of Vikings on FB, or enthuse together about the new hit album by Fitz and the Tantrums. We’ll never connect with her on the personal level that we can with Schroeder or Dodd, who let the protective shield of their author persona slip on occasion.
Writers are recluses. They are difficult to get to know because they don’t share themselves easily. Maybe that’s a good thing (hell, maybe romance writers in particular are opening the gates of hell as you read this distractingly long post). But writers who produce exciting and entertaining books are not going to be boring people. As readers, we should get excited when one of them drops the persona long enough to say something interesting, something controversial. It’s a sign that they probably write books worth reading too.
Dodd, Wylde and Schroeder, Wendig, and authors like them, inspire me to keep thin the veil between author and writer in my blog and social media posts. Maybe someday, I’ll be so widely read that I’ll become the target of some ‘fan’atical reaction to one of my—oops, Selene’s–posts. Hey, maybe I’ll sell enough books to buy myself dinner out as a form of consolation.
While Selene is being burned at the stake, pelted with rotten tomatoes and sliced to shreds with whips, I’ll try to remember that she said something interesting because the writer behind the persona would rather face the pain of exposure than sit quietly with her head down pretending to be invisible. After all, she’s all grown up now, and knows about a lot more than the parts of speech these days. Still, I can imagine the draw of a series of blogs on nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. Like not ever.