Successful brands use visuals to jog the memory of existing and potential consumers. The visual element for writers publishing online is limited to the avatar picture in their profiles. Choosing that picture with care and making it memorable is one way of increasing recognition value for your present and future readers. Once established, you'll just have to be brave enough to stick with it.
If you look at printed books, you will notice that books by the same author share certain characteristics to make them recognizable to readers. Besides font, lay-out and design style, one of the characteristics that never change is the picture of the author. A book published 10 years ago will show the same picture of the author as the one published last week. Successful authors haven’t discovered the secret of eternal life. Their picture on the book is like the avatar in your profile. It is a pictograph for the author, not the real self. Publishers only change that picture under duress, e.g. when the author is re-branded by winning the Nobel Prize for Literature and their actual face is seen in all media channels.
For online writers, the profile avatar is all the space they get to promote their brand by means of a picture. Because of that, it is important to give some thought to choosing the right picture to take that place. The wrong picture could give an impression the author wants to avoid, it might not be memorable, or it could smacks of amateurism. Any one of these three possibilities impacts on the income generated by the articles.
You could choose a picture of yourself as an avatar. If you are using your real name, it would be the obvious and logical choice. The combination of your real name and real image would be an incentive for your friends to read your articles. If you use your counterfeit, divorce yourself from the idea that it is your picture. Once you use it as your avatar, it becomes a brand and should not be changed for any minor considerations.
Whatever you do, don’t use pictures of celebrities. You are not David or Victoria Beckham; using their faces lets people recognize them, not you the author. It is counterproductive to your aim of becoming a recognizable and memorable brand. It is also against the law, as you are breaching their rights to their own pictures. Using their pictures as part of an article about them is legal, as your article is part of the public domain and their pictures are part of the story you tell. Your avatar is visible to the public, but it is in your private domain. Using their picture there is out of order; worse, your avatar is part of a business and using such pictures is tantamount to fraud.
If you don’t want to use a picture of yourself, use one you made of whatever you like. Your pet is a legitimate subject, or your garden. A picture should be unique. That is quite a challenge if you don’t have an extraordinary pet. A picture of your white dog on your white sofa might be unique, but it won’t be very memorable, if it can be seen against a white background at all. A garden picture is problematical, too; a green bush looks like a green bush. If you go for an avatar that is not your own likeness, you should change the picture you took by Photoshop to the point where it becomes a work of art in its own right.
If you choose your pet as the brand to use, don’t use a funny picture if you intend to write serious articles. If you write about bipolar disorder and the avatar on the article shows a picture of a Great Dane wearing baseball outfit, nobody will trouble to read your article. They might consider you as a person who is suffering from that disorder instead.
Human memory is best suited to recognize human faces. A personal likeness is therefore the best choice to personalize and make it memorable for the reader. If you don’t want to be recognized as the author, you could use an old picture of yourself, rework it digitally if it is a paper print, and then use Photoshop to change it. It is improbable that anyone would recognize it after years in your shoebox.
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