What is Author Platform?

This week’s video I go over the foundations of what makes an author platform. Take a look:

I want to emphasize is the definition of what a platform is:

It is an online presence that does 2 things.

1. It let’s an audience discover you.
2. It let’s you communicate with that audience

And the most important thing I want to stress from that video is that the needs of a platform change. It depends on where you are. In some respects, that’s actually why I don’t 100% like the terminology: most of the time when people think about “platform” they think about growing social media accounts to hundreds of thousands of followers, using it to sell books, and then

That’s… not really how it works. Or rather, that’s the end game of what a platform looks like. At the early stages? It looks different.

More importantly, how people grow their platform matters. Too many folks see the end-game of thousands of followers, so they rush to increase their likes, subscribers, followers, monitoring their metrics, following back, just to watch those numbers climb higher. The quality of the audience who is discovering you matters – that’s why just spamming “like share and subscribe” or jumping onto every “Follow Friday” may move the metrics (I’ve written about this before), but when you try to pitch your book to them you’re not seeing it rain money.

I also intentionally don’t specify what your platform should be because these things change. When you’re trying to build a platform, you have to go where the audience you want is. For most authors, that’s, well, finding the bookish peeps. At the moment, they’re primarily on Twitter and Instagram.

I’ve had people scoff at that when I mention social media, and they want to shudder and hiss going “I hate Twitter and Instagram.” That’s totally fine: so long as you can find people and connect with them? It’ll work.

Ultimately when it comes to what to build your platform on, what medium to choose, the best thing I can say is go to where people are. That’s why social media is so great – you can connect with people all over the world who share your interests. The sheer number of eyeballs you can reach with one tweet is absolutely gob-smacking when you compare it to, say, handing out pamphlets at the mall. And unlike those pamphlets, it’s free (because especially starting out you aren’t worried about any sort of ads or anything like that).

So, yes, you should start building your platform. But I wanted to give you a clear idea of what that is. If you’re starting out, it’s okay to not be diving in and building yourself a big fancy website and starting a weekly podcast and sending out a weekly newsletter or starting an e-mail list. It really is okay to just be joining some social media accounts.

Now, how do you grow your platform in a way that’s more sustainable and organic? That’s what I’m talking about next week. Stay tuned.

Cheers. Be safe. Donate to your local bail funds.  There’s a lot going on out there in the world.