III- When you feel like two black cats in a trenchcoat

Lately, I’ve been thinking about branding.

Author branding, artist branding: cultivating a specific online presence that people will recognize, enjoy, share, and hopefully consume your content read your books and admire your artwork. It’s a daunting process, deciding which pieces of yourself to render up to public judgment and which parts to keep private, how to make yourself consumable interesting in a media landscape that gobbles up flash-in-the-pan virality and spits out shallow dopamine hits, how to be unique so you’ll stand out, how to be like everyone else so you’re marketable, how to be exactly what everyone wants you to be without sacrificing who you are. How to be delicious and not get eaten alive.

When you’re someone like me, who dreads being perceived, branding is almost second nature. The masks I choose to wear in public are carefully crafted because people are judgy and I’d rather them judge the thing framing my face instead of my actual face. Square your shoulders. Don’t be unexpectedly loud, but also don’t be so quiet that people tell you to speak up. Smile when you make eye contact. Don’t hold that eye contact too long, but don’t look away too quickly. The mask can always be altered and made better.

Online masks are easier. I can keep my actual human flesh completely hidden. I have the luxury to edit every word before I “speak,” the ability to alter or delete any spontaneous expression I decide is “too much” or “off-brand,” and the freedom to simply disappear for a while if it becomes too much. Of course, that means it’s easy—too easy—to craft a warm, welcoming, amiable impression of me that’s too hard to maintain for more than a few weeks. It’s why I’ve had such a difficult time marketing my books: I don’t know who to be when I do it, and I don’t want something permanent like my books tied to a facade. I don’t want to be two black cats in a trenchcoat pretending to be an author, but being perceived—actually perceived—is more exhausting than maintaining a mask. So, I don’t do any of it, and thus, nobody knows I exist.

Which is fine…until you have zero book sales for months, and nobody looks at your art, and you want that to change.