Have you ever opened Instagram or TikTok looking for ideas about how to market your book, and somewhere in the advice you hear, “You need to show more of yourself”?
Share your morning routine.
Take people behind the scenes.
Tell more personal stories.
Show your face more.
Let readers into your life.
And your immediate reaction is, I don't want to do that.
Maybe you're just a private person.
Maybe you write under a pen name.
Maybe you have a professional career that you want to keep completely separate from your writing.
Maybe you don't want your family, your home, your relationships, or your personal life becoming part of your author platform.
And that's where a lot of authors get stuck, because we're constantly told that successful marketing is about connection.
So if you don't want to share your personal life, does that mean you're going to have a harder time connecting with readers?
No.
But there is something you need to build instead.
I'm Jenn Hanson-dePaula. I'm a book marketing expert, and I help fiction and nonfiction authors simplify their marketing, connect with the right readers, and sell more books without letting marketing take over their lives.
And in this episode, I want to show you how to build a recognizable, trustworthy author brand without turning yourself into the product.
Because you do not have to become a personal brand to market your book.
You need to become recognizable to the right reader.
Those are two completely different things.
Connection Does Not Require Access
Here's where I think the confusion starts.
Authors hear things like, “People buy from people,” or, “Readers want to know the person behind the book.”
And there is some truth in that.
People do connect with people.
Familiarity is important.
Trust matters.
But somewhere along the way, we started treating connection and personal access like they're the same thing.
They're not.
Think about someone whose work you regularly follow.
Maybe it's a novelist you love.
Maybe it's a podcaster.
Maybe it's a journalist, a teacher, a chef, or someone whose newsletter you read every week.
You may feel like you know them in some way.
You recognize how they think.
You know what they talk about.
You understand their perspective.
You might even be able to recognize something they wrote before you saw their name attached to it.
But that doesn't necessarily mean you know anything important about their private life.
You don't need to know what their family did over the weekend, get a tour of their house, or know their morning routine.
The familiarity came from what they consistently gave you.
Their ideas.
Their voice.
Their point of view.
Their work.
And that's the distinction I want you to remember.
Your readers need enough consistency to recognize you.
They do not need unlimited access to you.
That means you can be private and still have personality.
You can have boundaries and still build connection.
You can keep large parts of your life completely offline and still create marketing that feels warm, interesting, and human.
The goal isn't to remove yourself from your marketing.
The goal is to decide what version of yourself belongs there.
Decide What Is Private Before You Decide What to Post’ on screen
One of the easiest ways to make marketing exhausting is to renegotiate your boundaries every single time you sit down to create something.
Should I talk about this?
Is this too personal?
Do people need to know this?
Would this perform better if I showed more?
What if I don't want to?
Instead, I want you to decide those boundaries ahead of time.
Think about your public author presence in three categories.
The first category is private.
These are things that simply are not content.
And you get to decide what's on that list.
It might be your family, your children, home, your exact location, your relationships, workplace, health, personal history, your political or religious views.
Whatever you choose.
There is no marketing rule that gets to overrule that boundary.
And then the second category is optional.
These are things you might share when they make sense, but you are never required to.
Maybe you occasionally talk about your writing process.
Maybe you share some of the books you're reading.
Maybe you talk about research you're doing.
Maybe there's a personal reason you care about the subject of your nonfiction book, and you're comfortable sharing part of that story.
Those things can create connection.
But they're tools.
They're not obligations.
And then the third category is what I would call your author-facing content.
This is the material you are intentionally willing to build your public presence around.
And this is where most of your marketing can live.
Your reader, your book, your themes, ideas, perspective, the questions your readers ask, the things they care about, the emotional experience they want from fiction, the transformation they're looking for from nonfiction, the conversations that naturally exist around the kind of work you create.
Once you know those three categories, marketing becomes much easier because you're no longer constantly asking, “How much of myself do I have to give away?”
You've already answered that question.
Now you can focus on what your reader actually needs from you.
Build Your Marketing Around the Reader’ on the screen
This is the shift that changes everything.
Instead of asking:
What can I share about myself?
Ask:
What does my reader care about?
That's a completely different content strategy.
And it's actually the foundation of how I teach book marketing.
Before you worry about what platform to use or what kind of content to create, you need to know who your reader is and what your book gives them.
Because when you're clear on those two things, you have far more to talk about than you think.
Let's say you're sitting down to create something this week.
You could talk about what your reader wants, what frustrates them. You could talk about a question your book explores, an emotional experience your reader wants to have. You could recommend another book, movie, or TV show they'll probably enjoy. You could take one theme from your book and start a conversation around it.
None of that requires a personal update.
And more importantly, every one of those ideas gives the right reader a reason to stop and pay attention.
That's the part so many authors miss.
The question is whether the reader you're trying to reach recognizes or sees something that matters to them.
That's where connection begins.
What This Looks Like for Fiction Authors
If you're a fiction author, this is especially freeing because sometimes authors think, “Well, I don't teach anything. What am I supposed to talk about if I'm not talking about myself?”
You're talking about the reader's relationship with the kind of stories you write.
Let's say you write second-chance romance.
You don't need to make your content about your own relationships.
You could talk about why second-chance stories are so satisfying.
You could talk about the moment when two characters realize the version of each other they've been holding onto is no longer true.
You could recommend other books with that same emotional experience.
You could talk about what makes a second chance believable instead of frustrating.
Now you're creating content for the reader who is already drawn to the type of story you're writing.
Or maybe you write fantasy.
You can talk about worldbuilding, found family, morally complicated characters, political intrigue, magical systems, quests, enemies-to-allies, or whatever emotional experience lives at the center of your books.
The point is that you do not have to talk about tropes all day.
But rather that your book lives inside a much larger world of reader interests.
That's your content.
You don't have to make your private life interesting enough to market your novel.
Your job is to understand what makes the novel interesting to the right reader.
What This Looks Like for Nonfiction Authors
For nonfiction, the application is different, but the general idea is the same.
Your content can live around the problem your reader is trying to solve.
The question they're asking.
The result they want.
The mistakes they're making.
The thing they've tried that didn't work.
So let's say you wrote a book about managing money after divorce.
You do not need to turn your own marriage or financial life into public content.
You can talk directly to the person who suddenly has to make financial decisions alone.
You can explain something they're probably confused about.
You can challenge advice that doesn't fit their situation.
Maybe your own story is relevant and you want to use it.
Great.
But it is not required for the content to work.
The value is in how clearly you understand the reader and how useful your perspective is to them.
The same is true if your book is about leadership, parenting, grief, health, or anything else.
Your personal story can strengthen your message.
But your personal story is not your entire marketing strategy.
Private Does Not Mean Invisible
Now, there is one important warning I want to give you here.
Because sometimes when authors hear, “You don't have to share your personal life,” they swing all the way to the other side.
The account becomes book cover, quote, book cover, “available now,” quote, book cover.
And then they're frustrated because no one is connecting.
That isn't a privacy problem.
It's a relevance problem.
You still need to give people something to connect to, a point of view, and to understand what you write and why it matters to them.
You still need personality.
But personality and personal information are not the same thing.
Your sense of humor, opinions about your genre, how you explain something, your taste in books, perspective, and enthusiasm is all your personality.
The things you notice that other people don't notice are personality.
You can bring all of that into your marketing while keeping the parts of your life that are none of anyone else's business completely private.
And in some ways, having boundaries can make your marketing clearer.
Because instead of waking up every day asking, “What part of myself should I share?”
You're asking, “What do I want to be known for?”
That's a much better marketing question.
Give Readers Something to Recognize
So if you're trying to build your marketing without becoming a personal brand, here's what I want you to do.
First, decide what stays private.
Make the list.
Don't leave those boundaries up to the pressure of whatever platform you're using that day.
Second, decide what you're comfortable sharing occasionally.
These are optional pieces of your author presence, they are not requirements.
And third, choose what you actually want people to recognize you for.
If you write fiction, that might be the emotional experiences, themes, reader conversations, and types of stories you consistently write.
If you write nonfiction, it might be the problems you help people solve, the beliefs you challenge, and the transformation your work supports.
Then repeat those ideas.
Not word for word.
But consistently enough that your reader starts to understand:
Oh, this is the author who writes that kind of story.
Or:
This is the person who helps me think about this problem differently.
That's what a brand really is.
Recognition.
It is not a requirement that strangers know everything about you.
What I want you to remember is this:
You do not have to choose between your privacy and marketing your book well.
You just need to stop building the marketing around access to your life and start building it around relevance to your reader.
And if this episode made you realize, “Okay, I know I don't want my life to be my content, but I still don't know exactly what I should be talking about or how all of this fits together,” that's exactly what I built the 90-Day Book Sales System to help you do.
It starts with your ideal reader and your book's promise, then helps you build the messages, content, email list, and sales system around that foundation so your marketing isn't dependent on constantly coming up with something personal or new to share.
The link to the 90-Day Book Sales System is in the description.
You are allowed to be private.
You are allowed to have boundaries.
And you can still build a reader community that knows exactly what you create, who it's for, and why they want more of it.
I'll see you next time.
