Page 8 of Written By a Woman

“Yes,” Michelle nodded, “You don’t need to be posting selfies every day or anything. But it would be beneficial for readers to put a face to the name—speaking of, just wanted to double check, are you sure you want to stick with your real name and not a pen name of some kind?”

I frowned, “A pen name might have been a better idea,” especially since using my name potentially made it easier for people I work with to find my book, though I suspected I was the only person in the entire office who was into romance novels, and was really banking on that assumption to not fail me, “But I’m worried that I’ve already established myself with my real name, considering it’s been my profile picture this entire time.”

Michelle tilted her head side to side though, weighing the pros and cons, “It’s up to you, so if you’re comfortable sticking with your real name, that’s fine.”

I shrugged, because it was more of a lazy, passive decision at this point, “Sounds good.”

“But think about the face-reveal thing,” Michelle pressed, “If you’re already using your real name, there is no real harm in showing your face to readers, too.”

She had a point.

Might as well go balls to the wall if I really wanted to do this.

“It’ll be easier to promote and sell the books to readers if your social media following is already established,” Michelle added, “Publishers might also want you to have professional headshots to put in the back of the book. A photoshoot might be a fun thing to plan for in the future, too.”

“Hmm, I’ll sit on that and let you know,” was my non-committal response. The problem with plastering my face all over my author account was that, again, it wouldn’t be hard for anyone I worked with to find out I wrote a book, read that book, and immediately know who I was writing about.

Especially if future cover art depicts Zaid’s appearance as well as the fan art has so far.

Oh, dear god.

Perhaps I could hold off on revealing my face until after publishers wanted to sign with me, until after I could quit my job and try to blow off the Zaid/Zayne resemblance as pure coincidence, should anyone at work find out about it.

Double-checking that I had no future questions or concerns about the querying process, and lying to Michelle by saying I had no concerns at all at this point, Michelle and I ended the video call. I took a moment to internally squeal at the excitement of all this, the fact that I had an agent, that I had a big-kid editor combing through my story to make it better and did a happy little shimmy in my seat. I closed my laptop and turned on the TV to one of my favorite comfort shows to watch, knowing that my mind would be too all over the place to pay attention to anything new that night. After ordering dinner and blatantly ignoring my phone’s newest social media notifications, I finally called it a night and went to bed, lulling myself to sleep with made-up stories in my head about two people stumbling into each other’s lives at work and falling in love.

All while bending over backward to make the male love interest any other persona than the CTO at my job, and giving up hope, before finally succumbing to sleep.

ChapterTwo

SIGNE

God bless the bookish community.

A week or so passed, and I was doing a decent job of staying active on my social media account like Michelle advised, but I still hadn’t posted a selfie or anything. I did, on occasion, get inspired to write a spinoff sequel, of characters that were introduced in my first book, but wasn’t sure who would get their own story next? I would sometimes get an insatiable urge to pull out a notebook and write an idea down. Or pull my laptop open and type out a scene that just wouldn’t get out of my head. Perhaps feeling mildly successful after meeting with Michelle gave me more confidence to keep going.

This came to me more often now that I had supposedly gotten the bookish community’s blessing to write a formal manuscript instead of posting chapters of my story online. People have been following me while begging me to post the next chapter. A few days ago I bit the bullet and posted about how I wouldn’t be sharing new chapters because I was officially signed with an agent and was pursuing traditional publishing. I woke up the following few mornings with new notifications, comments, and tags all congratulating me on signing with an agent and wishing me luck on my adventure. They were all willing to wait for the revised and fresh aspects of Zayne and Sydney’s love story. Most knew that traditionally publishing a book would take time and weren’t bitter about it at all.

Keeping my handle something silly like @ReadHeadedWriter helped me feel hidden from the bookish community, even though my real name and picture were on my profile for those who cared because I officially decided that I wasn’t willing to confuse myself with a pen name. I figured that if I was going to write something people loved, I wanted to claim those words proudly.

But mostly anxiously, because I still didn’t want certain people finding out about this aspect of my life. Having people tag my account and seeing @ReadHeadedWriter instead of, hypothetically, @AuthorSigneLange also helped me feel like I was protecting myself from future humiliation.

Or future reprimand from Jacqueline, who would probably add a whole section to the Sun Steer Code of Conduct explaining how unethical it was to write smutty fanfic about members of upper management. I vaguely remembered Jacqueline mentioning something in my onboarding process about how Sun Steer had a right to look through any public social media accounts that I had, but I didn’t have any active social media accounts at the time, so I didn’t think much of it.

Now I did, but I assumed that Jacqueline wasn’t about to follow up with me to see if I was randomly active on social media again or not. She had no reason to do that.

Plus, Zaid’s inspiration for the love interest or not, my account had nothing to do with my day job. It was completely separate, if things worked out how I hoped. There was no need to disclose my new author account to Jacqueline for any reason. Especially if I was going to quit if a publisher offered me enough money to do so.

And that’s how I started wondering if showing my face to readers really was that risky at all. There were less than five women in the office, who hadn’t disclosed their love for reading to me at all—and not to be totally sexist—but I really doubted any of the tech bros here read romance novels.

The only social media they were active on was probably Reddit or Discord.

Their feeds were probably just a bunch of posts about their noisy-as-hell mechanical keyboards.

“Heads up!” Mary called, making my gaze lift from my phone just in time to see a Rubix cube, that she had just tossed, flying toward my head. I yelped and dropped my phone in my lap to prevent my face from being impaled by the sharp edges of the children’s toy.

“Nice catch,” Mary smirked as she sauntered over to my desk and leaned her elbows over the edge.

“Amazing what the body can do when immediately threatened,” I smiled at her as I gave the cube back to her.

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