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You’re Not Bad at Marketing. You’re Bad at Talking About Yourself.
June 7, 2026
a small permission to brag in good lighting
Most writers are great at promoting other people's work and weird about their own.
That's not a marketing problem. It's a self-talk problem. The fix isn't to become more confident — it's to use a structural trick that bypasses the self-talk altogether. We rebuild your marketing voice using the Maven third-person trick, the boring sentences that outperform clever ones, and the one phrase you should remove from every sales page you have ever written. The phrase, briefly, is 'I just.' Anywhere it appears, delete it. The page gets stronger immediately.
Hedged voice · marketing voice
| Hedged | Direct |
|---|---|
| 'I just made a small course about…' | 'A course on…' |
| 'I think this might help' | 'This helps with X' |
| 'Hopefully this is useful' | 'Use this for X' |
| 'I'm not an expert but…' | Skip this. Period. |
The third-person trick
- Open your sales page.
- Rewrite every sentence in third person, as if a colleague is describing you.
- Notice the page gets stronger.
- Now rewrite back to first person, keeping the spine.
- Remove every 'I just' and 'hopefully.'
The fix to marketing isn't confidence. It's bypassing the self-talk altogether. Third-person it. Strip the hedges. Switch back. The page becomes you, only less afraid.
— L.A. Walton, The Book Maven
From the Maven Catalog
- Master Course — Sell Without Squirming
- eBook — The Third-Person Trick
- Toolkit — Author Marketing Toolkit
- Planner — Marketing Voice Planner
Run the third-person rewrite this weekend. Strip the hedges. The page converts. You haven't changed. You've just stopped sabotaging the sentence on its way out the door.