A Platform to Stand On III: The Recipe

The elements of an effective publishing platform for a writer, Part III

In this final post in my series on Danielle Girard’s Queens MFA Professional Development Weekend seminar on author platforms, we’ll cover what was perhaps the most useful piece of advice Danielle shared, which was the idea of a brand recipe one can build to help drive how we might construct and execute an author platform. The idea is to sit down and ask yourself who you are, and then create a bullet list of what makes you tick—that is, what are the most important and compelling aspects of your life? Danielle gave us her example, but I don’t remember it, so I’ll do one for myself in real time.

What makes me tick?

• Progressive politics
• Fiction writing
• Reading – fiction
• Reading – news and reportage
• Family
• Playing and watching basketball
• Cycling and watching professional cycling
• Silicon Valley and California at large
• The tech industry and social networking
• Journalism and news media

Now one might scan that list and say, “Great, there’s ten things there that pretty much add up to everything under the sun!” But that’s not true. There are some big items that would undoubtedly appear on many people’s lists that don’t appear on mine: music, movies, and faith, just to name a few. I like music and movies, and I’m interested in (and have written in this blog about) some aspects of religious faith, but none of these things are essential to who I am. They don’t drive my day-to-day activities like all these things do.

These are the ingredients in your brand recipe, and the next step is to portion them out. You do this by asking, what percentage of my web, social media, and newsletter content should pertain to each of these? So here’s how I’ll portion them out, off the top of my head:

• Progressive politics – 15%
• Fiction writing – 15%
• Reading – fiction – 15%
• Reading – news and reportage – 5%
• Family – 10%
• Playing and watching basketball – 5%
• Cycling and watching professional cycling – 5%
• Silicon Valley and California at large – 10%
• The tech industry and social networking – 10%
• Journalism and news media – 10%

As I unveil and then manage my platform from day to day, I can use this recipe to guide how I want to reveal myself to readers. Again, as mentioned above, none of this is directly aimed at selling. The idea is to connect through a consistent but not obnoxious amount of engagement, and to let readers know who you are so they can relate to you in ways beyond the effects of your published words.

Resources

Danielle was kind enough to share a number of resources that can help provide even more insight into the concept of a publishing platform:

• Publishing … and Other Forms of Insanity
• shewrites.com
• WeGrowMedia (Dan Blank)

So get out there and build (or continue to build) your brand—and have fun with it!

A Platform to Stand On II: Elements

The elements of an effective publishing platform for a writer, Part II

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.

A Platform to Stand On I: Engagement

The elements of an effective publishing platform for a writer, Part I

Continuing with my posts recounting craft tips from the Queens MFA Professional Development Weekend that I attended in mid-September, let’s talk about platforms. I’m a crusty old curmudgeon, so even though I’ve been around social networking probably longer than any of you, I’m still like, “Platforms? Really?” But yeah, it’s a thing, and you need to know about it if you want to get published these days.

This is the first of three posts on the topic, derived from a seminar on author platforms delivered at PD Weekend. The presenter (and, full disclosure, close personal friend of mine) Danielle Girard, has launched a platform that effectively uses web, social media, and ecommerce to drive sales of her fourteen highly successful thrillers. In this post, we’ll provide a definition of an author platform and talk a little about the platform’s primary objective, engagement. In follow-on posts, we’ll cover the elements of the platform and something Danielle called the brand recipe.

Platform Defined

First and foremost—and mercifully—Danielle gave us her definition of a platform: It’s essentially your brand, delivered to your readers through a steady flow of communications such as social media posts, e-mail newsletters, and website updates. The key term publicists and social media mavens use is engagement, and the idea, Danielle says, is to be consistent without being annoying.

Engagement

Effective engagement attempts to do one or more of four things:

• Educate
• Inspire
• Enlighten
• Entertain

Danielle was keen to point out that selling is not one of the direct objectives of author engagement. The idea is to connect with readers, not to separate them from their money. (That comes, if all is done well, over time.)

And, of course, there are certainly people—too many people, I would say—who enrage to engage. If that’s who you are, you’re of course free to do what you will, and if you can do it while still playing nice, more power to you. (More on that in Part II.)