In this post, Part II of my series on Danielle Girard’s
Queens MFA Professional Development Weekend seminar on author platforms,
let’s talk about the elements of an author platform. The key elements of
a good author platform—and these necessarily vary from person to person—can be
the:
- Author website
- Blog
- Social media
- Email list
The objective of the author website is to introduce
yourself to readers and, more practically, to give strategically placed
hyperlinks a good place to land. For a great example, look at Danielle’s site, and for a less-great example, look at mine. Links to the site
should appear in your email signature, social media profiles, and on your
submission cover letters, at the very least. Which means, of course, you’ll
want to always have confidence, and even pride, in what you post there. The
website is also where readers go for the latest and greatest about you, such as
book launches, author appearances, and news. If you’re like Danielle and you’ve
got a lot going on, you’ll need to have the site updated frequently; if you’re
more like me, you can leave it static—but not too static.
Since you’re reading a blog at this very moment, I
probably don’t need to explain what that is. But there are very different
approaches to the blog, which Danielle discussed at some length. She refers to
her blog as a “web journal,” and she uses it to report on recent events,
to engage readers with very short bursts of inspiration, or to
simply stay connected. Danielle advises that the keys with a blog are frequency—you
should post twice a week, minimum—and brevity—your posts should be 500 words in
length, maximum. And, despite the fact that those two maxims work so nicely
together (we’re more able to post frequently if we keep our posts short), I
manage to egregiously violate both of them. Ugh. Oh well, we all need to do
better.
Social media is the big bugaboo, of course, because
of the incontrovertible fact that a dopamine-driven, technology-fueled
phenomenon invariably becomes extremely time-consuming, and even mood-altering.
At minimum, Danielle says, one should be on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram,
and like blogs, posts should be kept short and should engage in one of the ways
listed in Part I. (Which is actually pretty easy for writers: Who
doesn’t want to educate, inspire, enlighten, or entertain, after all?) One
problem discussed during the Q&A was the era we’re living in and the
pounding drumbeat of vitriolic politics we have to deal with every day, which,
for many of us, pervades our social media presence. Danielle has chosen to
separate her politics from her brand, but she freely acknowledges that this is
impossible for some people. (Just scroll the TOC of this blog and you’ll see
where I’ve settled, at least for now.) Bottom line is that, as with everything
around one’s platform, the answer is as unique as the individual. Anything can
work as long as you’re true to yourself.
The email list, Danielle explained, is how the
writer offers herself up to her most loyal readers for a deeper, though less
frequent, level of engagement. While organizations and publications will
distribute email newsletters weekly, or even daily, the author will do better
to keep them intermittent, infrequent, and associated with an impending event
or newsworthy development. Newsletter subscribers are the ones most likely to
buy every book, know every character, and post ratings and reviews to Amazon,
Goodreads, or their own blogs. As such, they are more invested in the writer’s
success, and you want to reward that investment with inside news, and even
special offers. (Obviously, if you’re a very busy—which is to say, very
famous—author, your approach, or that of your publicists, will be very
different. But if that’s you, you’re probably not reading this blog in the
first place.)
Next up, in Part III, we'll introduce the very helpful concept of a brand recipe for authors.
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