Building a Brand Voice Guide Your VA Can Follow

The most common reason author VA relationships produce work that doesn't quite sound right — social posts that are technically fine but feel slightly off, email copy that's grammatically correct but tonally wrong — isn't that the VA is unskilled. It's that the author never explicitly told the VA what their voice actually sounds like. They assumed it was obvious, or that a capable VA would figure it out from the examples, or that they'd just correct as they go. None of those assumptions holds up well in practice.

Your author voice is the most distinctive and valuable element of your brand. It's what readers recognize even before they've consciously registered your name — the warmth, the humor, the directness, the specific vocabulary, the characteristic way you frame an observation or close an email. For a VA to reproduce that voice in marketing copy, social content, and reader communications, they need to understand it explicitly, not intuitively. A brand voice guide is the document that makes explicit what you've previously kept implicit — and it's the foundation on which every piece of delegated writing sits.

What a Brand Voice Guide Is and Isn't

A brand voice guide for an author isn't the same thing as a corporate style guide. You don't need a forty-page document with color codes and typography specifications. What you need is a clear, practical reference document that a VA can consult before writing anything in your name — and that gives them enough specificity to make the right calls independently rather than asking you for direction on every sentence.

The guide should be readable in fifteen to twenty minutes and practically useful the first time someone reads it. It should give your VA the answer to 'would Randall say this?' for a wide range of situations, without requiring them to ask you. The best brand voice guides are direct, specific, and full of examples — the actual examples being more useful than any amount of description.

The Core Elements of an Author Brand Voice Guide

1. Who You Are As an Author

Start with context: who you are, what you write, and how you think about your relationship to your readers. Not a formal bio — your VA probably already has that — but a candid description of your author identity that gives them a felt sense of who they're representing. 'I write dark fantasy with a lot of heart. My readers come for the magic and stay for the characters. I care about them in a way that isn't professional — I think of them as friends who trust me with their reading time, and I take that seriously.' That paragraph tells a VA more about your voice than a list of adjectives would.

2. Tone Descriptors — With Examples

List the qualities that characterize your voice and back each one with an example. 'Warm but direct' is vague. 'Warm but direct — like this newsletter closing: [paste actual example]' gives a VA something to calibrate against. Aim for five to eight qualities, each with at least one real example of your writing that demonstrates it.

• Warm but direct: 'I mean what I say and I say it clearly, but always with genuine care for the reader on the other end'

• Occasionally funny, never at readers' expense: 'I'll make fun of myself or my situation but never of my readers or their taste'

• Confident but not arrogant: 'I know what I'm doing after sixteen years of this, and I say so without apologizing — but I don't talk down to readers who are just starting out'

• Specific over generic: 'I don't write vague marketing copy. I'd rather say one true specific thing than three impressive-sounding generalities'

3. Vocabulary and Phrasing Patterns

List words, phrases, and sentence patterns you use consistently — and ones you avoid. This is where your voice becomes concrete in a way that's immediately applicable.

4. What I'd Never Say or Do

This section is often as valuable as the positive descriptors. Explicitly listing the tone, language, and approaches your brand would never use prevents your VA from accidentally crossing a line they didn't know existed.

• 'I would never tell readers they're missing out or use fake urgency — if a sale ends Thursday, it ends Thursday, and I say so, but I don't manufacture pressure'

• 'I don't write in all caps for emphasis, use multiple exclamation points, or use emojis in newsletters — social posts occasionally, newsletters never'

• 'I don't make political statements in my author communications even when I have opinions — my author brand is a space for readers across the spectrum'

• 'I don't respond to negative reviews publicly and I don't reference specific critical reviews in any marketing material'

5. Platform-Specific Voice Notes

Your voice isn't identical across every channel. You might be slightly more formal in a newsletter than on Instagram, slightly more casual on TikTok than in a press release. Document these variations so your VA calibrates appropriately for the platform they're writing for.

• Newsletter: warmest, most personal, longest — readers who subscribed to the newsletter want the full Randall experience

• Instagram captions: visual-first, shorter, conversational, two to three hashtags maximum

• Facebook author page: slightly more community-oriented, more question prompts and conversation starters

• ARC/reader emails: warm but professional, clear ask stated early, gratitude genuine and specific

• Press or media outreach: more formal than any reader-facing channel, third-person bio, journalistic framing

6. Examples Library

The most useful section of any brand voice guide is a curated library of examples — your actual writing across the different formats your VA will be producing. At minimum, include three to five examples of each of the following:

• Social media posts that hit the right tone across your active platforms

• Newsletter openings and closings that demonstrate your relationship with your readers

• ARC or reader email communications that show your warmth and directness

• A promotional message (sale announcement, new release, preorder) that demonstrates how you sell without being salesy

• One example of a correction you've made to VA output with an explanation of what the original missed — this is the most actionable learning tool you can provide

Building the Guide: A Practical Process

If you've never articulated your brand voice explicitly before, the process of building this guide can feel surprisingly difficult. Most authors know their voice when they're writing in it, but finding the words to describe it abstractly is a different skill. A few approaches that help.

Start by pulling ten to fifteen pieces of your existing writing across different formats — social posts, newsletter sections, emails — and reading them with fresh eyes, as if you were reading someone else's work. What patterns do you notice? What qualities are consistent? What would be jarring if it were different? That reading surfaces the implicit rules you've been following without consciously naming them.

A second useful approach: find two or three examples of writing in your general category that is clearly not your voice — authors in your genre whose marketing copy sounds different from yours, or examples of corporate-sounding author communication you'd never produce — and articulate specifically what's different. 'This doesn't sound like me because it's too formal / too salesy / too vague / too impersonal.' The contrast often reveals your own qualities more clearly than introspection alone.

⚠ Don't build the brand voice guide from scratch with AI. It's tempting to ask a general AI tool to 'write a brand voice guide for an author who...' and use the output as a starting point. The problem is that the guide will describe a generic version of the qualities you listed rather than your actual voice. Build it from your actual writing samples — the guide needs to be grounded in what you actually produce, not in what you intend to produce or what sounds appealing when described.

Testing and Updating the Guide

A brand voice guide that never gets tested or updated is a document, not a tool. Once you've built an initial version, give it to your VA alongside a test task and see what happens. Review the output against your guide: where did they get it right, and where did the guide fail to provide enough guidance for them to get it right? The gaps in the output tell you what's missing from the guide.

Update the guide whenever you notice a consistent pattern of correction — if you're making the same type of adjustment to your VA's work repeatedly, the guide isn't specific enough about that element. Add the specific example and the specific rule. Over time, as your VA internalizes the guide and your corrections become rarer, the guide becomes a historical reference rather than a working tool — which is exactly what you want.

Conclusion

A brand voice guide takes a few hours to build and saves dozens of hours of correction and revision across the life of your VA relationship. More importantly, it's the document that makes genuine voice-consistent delegation possible — not just administrative task handover, but the kind of creative and marketing work that readers will encounter and that shapes their relationship with your author brand. The next article covers the other foundational document: the author VA toolkit, the complete map of every tool and account in your publishing business that your VA needs to understand.

Hello, I'm Randall Wood. When I'm not pounding the keyboard or entertaining my giant dog I like to build tools for my fellow indie authors. In these articles, you'll find lessons learned over sixteen years spent in the indie author world. I share it all here to help you get one step closer to where you want to be.— Randall