Marketing the Writer Persona

I was reading an article on The Millions about making the media presence of the writers as a vital component of marketing their books. Talking strictly about fiction as the article also seems to do, I agree with the writer of the article on the idea that online presence makes the author into a flat character, like a celebrity whose facade doesn't reflect his or her human complexity, or even the complexity of the book. Just imagine that you are reading a wonderful novel, but from your head, you just can't erase the author's completely corny profile picture on the book's website that manages to reduce the core of the book into a single catchy message. Okay, fine, fiction writers probably don't have reductive websites for their novels, but there's a certain pleasure in going through the threads of a complex novel and perhaps trying to create an image of the author from those complexities. The author stays as the vague, mysterious weaver of words. We might have their biography, but we cannot make them into one dimensional media persona, someone who simply becomes a profile picture to which we automatically connect the book.

Okay, so that's fiction. Now, non-fiction has more danger of having reductive websites with snappy lines like "Do more in Less Time." And I am all for selling the authors and what they stand for in their fields, because non-fiction audience doesn't have the time to be exploring the complex maze of narrative fiction. However, I wonder if this marketing strategy turns the authors into a commodity. Not in the sense that they are disposable commodity; they probably won't be considered a commodity if the books are bestsellers and the authors become so famous and popular in their field that they attract hundreds of speaking opportunities. But, commodity in the sense that they simply become a cover picture for that "message" they stand for in their books and no longer human writers.  They lose that human complexity, and soon I start to see them not as writers, but as brands.

And think about it. Would you rather be human or the label on the Coca-Cola bottle?