Platform is the world you have built around yourself as an author. These are the avenues to let the world know about your book. It is all about “Getting Noticed,” an earlier blog.
There is an old joke: “When is the best time to plant a tree?”
“Twenty years ago.”
When is the best time to build your platform for your writing? Twenty years ago.
Some reading this may think, “How could I do that when I wasn’t born?” but if you don’t start building your platform now, you will regret it in twenty years.
Agents ask for your website and social media presence to be included in your query. If they go to your website and find it stale, and you last posted on Twitter in January (about your cat), the agent is pretty sure no one knows you as a writer. And when your book comes out, no one will know.
One misconception is that if an agent sells your book, the publisher will somehow magically put a bug in a few select ears, and soon “everyone” will know of the novel’s debut. In reality, that won’t happen. My mother and our daughter both have published books through a trade press. (Not self-published.) My mother felt Dutton should have done more to publicize her books. Our daughter graduated from USC with a degree in Public Relations. Rachel spends hours and hours doing the Platform work, getting the word out about her three books. Today, her website is pitching another author’s book. (Platform is a give and take proposition.)
If you self-publish and have no platform, no one will ever know about your book. It will be one of the 3.4 million books on Amazon. And some of those 3.4 million books are shored up by the author’s platform.
Do you have a platform for Members of the Cast, George? Yes, you are reading part of it and may have found out about this blog on Twitter. Is the book selling? Yes. By the thousands? No. By the hundreds? Well—sales topped 100 about six weeks ago.
Here is a detailed Platform Guest Blog on Renée Gendron’s website.
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