Why Our Author Has No Photograph

Every publisher's media kit has an author photo. Ours has a monogram — a teal square with the initials DW — and a note in the Press page assets that says, in full: "no author photograph is supplied." This post explains why, because the reason is a policy of this house, not an oversight.

Dana Whitaker is a pen name, and we say so

The author's page on this site states it plainly: Dana Whitaker is a pen name. The media kit states it. We have never presented the name as anything else, and we ask journalists and booksellers not to either. A pen name is an ordinary publishing tool with a long history; it becomes a deception only at the moment it is used to invent a life. So we do not invent one. There is no biography beyond the canonical one printed in the books, no hometown, no family story, no credentials — the author is described, accurately, as an author: not a therapist, not an attorney, not a mediator, not a coach.

The books are tools, not a memoir

The Clean Record Series is written to be used at a kitchen table at midnight, not to be the story of one family's divorce. An author's photograph invites the reader to judge the messenger — her age, her face, her resemblance to their own situation — when everything that matters is in the messages themselves. The work is the scripts, the checklists, and the method, and they stand or fall on whether they help. We would rather they be judged that way.

There is also a plainer reason. The real people behind any pen name in this subject area include children, who did not choose to have their family become a public story. A monogram protects them at zero cost to the reader. Everything a reader legitimately needs to know is in the books and in our published standards; nothing a photograph could show would verify a single script.

What this means in practice

For media: use the monogram and the book cover from the media kit, exactly as supplied. Interviews and speaking are about the Clean Record Method and parallel parenting — the work, not the author's own family — and requests route through press@bothhomespress.com. For readers: the person answering reader mail as Dana is the author of the books you are reading; the name on the cover is the name the work is published under, disclosed as a pen name everywhere it appears.

We think this is what honesty looks like for a house like ours: the name is a name, openly. The standards are published. The corrections log is public. The photograph is a monogram — and now you know why.