Most writers will say they hate the self-promotion and branding aspect of being a professional author. Well, I’m not one of them.
I don’t feel weird at all about self-promotion. I love my book, and I want as many people as possible to read it, so promoting it feels natural to me, just like promoting any other book that I love (and I am the kind of person who will shout until my throat is raw about books I love – which reminds me HAVE YOU GUYS READ THESE BOOKS YET????).
Also – and this might be the most millennial shit I’ve ever said – personal branding has helped me find myself. I started writing in my late 20s and got my agent and book deal in my early 30s (well, early-ish – I’ll be 35 by the time Temper releases), which is prime figure-your-shit-out time in anyone’s life. The process of figuring out who I am as a writer and what I want to say with my work has run in parallel with me discovering who I really am and what I actually want out of life. Developing my author brand has helped me get more comfortable with certain aspects of my personality that I now realize have been part of me all along: my darkness, my ambitious drive, my feminist principles. So maybe because of that, my public author “brand” doesn’t feel like a fake persona at all. It feels like the best version of myself – the person I wanted to be, who I’m now in the process of becoming. Curated and carefully presented, sure, but still real.
Women aren’t encouraged to be confident – to like or believe in ourselves at all, quite frankly. Well, fuck that. Writing a book and pursuing its publication is a fundamentally arrogant act, and there’s nothing wrong with a little arrogance. If you’re good at what you do, don’t downplay it or apologize for it. Own it. That’s all self-promotion is, really: saying, “hey, I made this thing, and I love it, and I hope you will too.”
So, in that spirit: my novel Temper comes out on July 2nd. You can preorder it here. I love it, and I hope you will too.
