Say you’ve spent a decade producing whitepapers on fintech trends and case studies about enterprise software. Now you want to tell your LinkedIn audience you’ve signed with a small press for a dragon fantasy trilogy. Will they think less of you or stop giving you work?

Corporate clients know me as a b2b copywriter, so admitting I was also a fiction writer felt strange at first. Most of that was just imposter syndrome, the familiar fear of being caught out as a fraud. The answer is to push on. Writers need people to promote to, and this crowd already knows you.

Remember businesses are just people

Your LinkedIn contacts may have serious job titles, impressive employers, and equally impressive thoughts about their industry, but they are just people, with all sorts of unexpected interests and aspirations. I know one senior industry client whose secret passion is skateboarding. Another loves to make jewelry.

They’ll likely respond to your alternate writing news with encouragement and approval. We’re all quietly nosey about what other people are up to out of hours, and clients will find you more memorable if they know a bit more about your hinterland.

The power of vulnerability

Sharing this side of you means allowing yourself to be vulnerable and personal. Time and again, studies show that emotional honesty lands very well on social media. People respond to people who take a brave step towards greater intimacy. Adding a pic of your Post-it-scattered workspace or first unboxing adds to the candour.

Framing your messages

Don’t jar your audience with a promotional link out of the blue and no context, though. A short lead-in at the top of the post sets expectations, telling readers what kind of hat you’re wearing today so they can pay attention or scroll by as they wish. For example:

‘As some of you know, when I’m not doing content outreach for startups, I like to build fantasy worlds. And today is the launch day for my latest…’

‘Forgive the personal post, but I have to let it out! After five years of persistence I’ve finally had an acceptance for…’  

Profile update

Update your profile so your different writing hats are cleanly visible, without letting the new one obscure the main reason you’re on LinkedIn and your priority audience. If you work in a heavily regulated or risk-averse space, a separate author page, linked from your main profile, may be more appropriate.

Frequency and consistency

Establish a rule of thumb – perhaps one personal post for every 6 or 7 professional ones. Seeing how your posts land and how people respond to them is a useful guide to further posting. Be active in threads that develop where people express an interest. I’ve sold quite a few books that way.

Don’t worry if no one responds to your first posts. It takes a while to appear on people’s radar. Show up every few weeks, with some personality and ideally humour, and some of your audience will start to look for your creative posts.

Look for crossover

There are lots of overlaps between commercial writing and creative work. From marketing, I’ve learned economy and how to put the reader first. From fiction, I’ve learned loads about storytelling and stamina. Posting about these crossovers pulls both sides of your writing self together in a way that can appeal to both audiences.

So a novelist could write about how editing dialogue taught her to cut every sentence that doesn’t move the reader forward, and how that applies just as well to a landing page. A brand video writer who also scripts short films could show how the same beats (set-up, turn, payoff) power both.

You could have some fun here too:

‘By day, I write ebooks for SaaS companies. By night, I write about thirteenth-century warlords in a mythical dystopia ruled by a pantheon of warring gods. Can’t think of where I get the inspiration…’

BIO – Dan Brotzel’s latest novels are Thank You For The Days and The Wolf in the Woods. He also writes widely on Medium