What to Look for in an Author Virtual Assistant
Finding candidates is the easy part. The harder work — and the work that determines whether a VA relationship actually transforms your publishing business or just adds a management obligation to your list — is evaluation. A VA who looks great on paper but communicates poorly, struggles to work without detailed daily direction, or has no genuine understanding of the publishing ecosystem will cost you more time and energy than they save. A VA who has the right combination of skills, temperament, and publishing knowledge becomes one of the most valuable professional relationships in your career.
This article covers what to look for. Not in the abstract — but specifically, with the characteristics ranked roughly in order of importance and the signals that help you assess each one before you've made a hire you can't easily undo.
Reliability Above Everything Else
The single most important quality in an author VA is not a skill — it's reliability. An author VA who shows up consistently, meets deadlines, communicates clearly when something goes wrong, and does what they say they'll do is more valuable than a VA with more impressive credentials who misses deadlines and disappears for days when there's a problem. This seems obvious stated directly, but it's easy to get distracted by impressive skill lists and glossy portfolios and miss the reliability signals that are right in front of you.
How do you assess reliability before you've hired someone? Through their behavior in the application and interview process itself. Did they respond to your initial contact within a reasonable time frame? Did they follow the application instructions you provided? Did they show up to a scheduled interview on time, prepared, and having read what you sent them? Did they follow up when they said they would? Every one of these is a small preview of how they'll behave as your VA. A candidate who can't manage a professional, reliable communication pattern during the courtship process is unlikely to improve after you've hired them.
Proactive Communication
Closely related to reliability but distinct enough to address separately: the best VAs are proactive communicators. They don't wait for you to check in to let you know something has gone sideways or that they have a question about how to proceed. They flag issues before they become your problem. They complete a task and tell you it's done without waiting to be asked. They notice something adjacent to their assigned work that might need attention and mention it unprompted.
This quality matters especially for indie authors because the whole point of a VA is to reduce the mental load of operating your publishing business — not to add a new item to the list of things you need to remember to monitor. A VA who requires constant check-ins and explicit prompting to communicate defeats a significant portion of that purpose. Ask candidates directly in the interview: 'Walk me through how you handle a situation where you hit an obstacle on a task and aren't sure how to proceed.' Their answer tells you more than a resume item about how they'll actually behave in that moment.
Publishing-World Familiarity
An author VA who already understands the indie publishing ecosystem — who knows what KDP is, what an ARC means, why BookFunnel exists, how a launch week works, what Goodreads librarians do — will be productive faster and make fewer mistakes than one who needs to be taught the landscape from scratch. This isn't a dealbreaker when it's absent (good VAs learn quickly), but it's a genuine advantage when it's present, and worth weighting accordingly.
Publishing familiarity shows up in different forms. The most obvious is prior experience specifically with author clients, which is worth asking about directly: 'Have you worked with indie authors before, and what did you do for them?' Prior blogging about books, participation in reader communities, or work with publishing-adjacent businesses (bookstores, libraries, literary agencies) are also meaningful signals. A VA who reads heavily in your genre — not as a professional credential but as a genuine personal habit — brings contextual knowledge about your readers' expectations and taste that's difficult to teach and genuinely useful.
The Specific Skills That Matter
Skills are more learnable than personality, which is why I've placed them lower on the priority list than reliability and communication. That said, specific skill gaps do create real friction, and the skills most relevant to author VA work are worth assessing deliberately.
Attitude Toward Your Work
This one is harder to quantify but genuinely important: the best author VAs are curious about your books and your career, not just about completing the task list. A VA who has read at least one of your books before the interview — especially one they sought out themselves rather than a free review copy you provided — is demonstrating a level of investment in the role that predicts future engagement. One who knows nothing about your work beyond what's in the job posting is telling you something different.
I'm not suggesting every VA candidate needs to have been a fan of your genre for years. But genuine curiosity about the work they're supporting is a meaningful positive signal. VAs who find the author-specific nature of the role interesting — who ask thoughtful questions about your launch calendar, your reader community, your marketing approach — tend to grow into the role differently than those who are primarily interested in the administrative mechanics.
Compatibility With Your Working Style
Author VA relationships that work long-term are working relationships in the full sense — they involve real communication, real adaptation on both sides, and a real dynamic that either clicks or doesn't. Assess this honestly during the interview rather than assuming it will sort itself out after the hire.
Some authors work best with VAs who take extensive direction and follow precise instructions; others want a VA who can be given a goal and trusted to figure out the execution. Some authors communicate heavily through voice messages and prefer a VA comfortable with that format; others are entirely text-based. Some need a VA who can work in their time zone; others don't care about synchronous overlap at all. None of these preferences is wrong, but mismatches in working style create friction that compounds over time.
Ask candidates how they prefer to receive feedback — some are energized by direct, specific critique; others need it framed more carefully to receive it well
Ask how many hours per week they're currently working and how they manage multiple clients — a VA who is already at capacity won't be able to give your work the attention it needs
Describe your own working style honestly and ask whether it's a fit — this is the conversation that surfaces incompatibilities before they become problems
What to Do About Skill Gaps
No candidate is going to be perfect across every dimension. The question is which gaps are acceptable and which are dealbreakers. My general framework: gaps in specific tools or platform knowledge are acceptable, because these are learnable and your onboarding process (covered later in this section) is where that learning happens. Gaps in fundamental work habits — reliability, communication, attention to detail — are much harder to close and are typically dealbreakers. Publishing-world familiarity falls in the middle: it's learnable with a good onboarding process, but a steep learning curve there combined with limited tool fluency and no prior author experience may be too much to take on simultaneously.
The other practical consideration is the match between a candidate's existing skills and the specific tasks you're hiring for. If your primary need is social media scheduling and content creation, prioritize platform fluency and written communication above all else. If your primary need is ARC management and reader community oversight, prior experience with those specific functions matters more than general VA skills. The position description you write for the role shapes who applies; your evaluation criteria shape who you hire. Both should be anchored in the actual tasks, not an idealized general VA profile.
A Note on Purpose-Built Services
One advantage of services like Author Anchor is that the vetting of basic reliability, communication quality, and publishing familiarity has already happened before you talk to a candidate. The platform's training and matching infrastructure means you're selecting from a pool that has already been screened for the foundational qualities described in this article. That doesn't eliminate the need for you to assess fit — chemistry, working style compatibility, and the specific skills relevant to your tasks still require your judgment — but it removes a layer of uncertainty from the process, particularly for authors hiring a VA for the first time and not entirely sure what they're looking for.
For authors conducting a more open search through freelancer platforms or community referrals, the evaluation work described in this article sits entirely with you. That's more work, but it also gives you more control over the full selection criteria. Both approaches have produced excellent author VA relationships; the right one depends on how much due diligence you want to own.
Conclusion
The VA you hire is going to know things about your business that almost no one else does — your launch timelines, your reader community dynamics, your email list, your income, your marketing strategy. That level of access and involvement makes the selection decision worth doing carefully. The next article walks through the hiring process step by step — from job posting through the test task and the offer — giving you the practical structure to apply the evaluation criteria covered here in a real hiring process.
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