I encountered a concept last week I’d never heard of before — the author platform. I read a thing on a blog, clicked through to another article and, intrigued, I googled, and came up with thousands of hits. Apparently, everyone’s talking about it, and it’s the new big thing in promotion. Who knew? I’d somehow missed the bandwagon.
Let’s see if I can describe it. This appears to be another term imported from the world of marketing (like “author branding”). The idea is that an author isn’t just an author, but a brand, and your platform is everything you do to promote yourself and build your brand — your online presence, your network, the interviews you do, your advertising, and so on. A lot of the people talking about the author platform insist that you need to promote yourself even before you’ve sold a book, the idea being that if you don’t have a “platform” from the beginning, if you haven’t established some kind of identity or angle for yourself, publishers won’t buy your manuscript in the first place. (One article even recommended setting your novel in a particular city with an eye toward marketing to residents and fans of that city. What happened to story again?)
This whole concept really bothers me for a lot of reasons. It also makes me really glad I’m not trying to sell my first novel now, because if someone told me I had to figure out how to market myself via a “platform” in addition to writing a slam-bang sellable book, I’d probably have curled up and imploded.
However, after reading one of the “how to” lists I encountered (”8 tips for building your author platform!” “10 steps to an unbeatable author platform!”), I realized that I actually did have an author platform before I sold my first book. It’s just that nobody called it that back then. (All of five years ago. . .see how fast these things take off?) I had a website, a dozen short stories published, and I’d managed not to make an ass of myself at science fiction conventions, so I even had a rudimentary network built up. Those were all just clearly defined steps I’d taken on the way to getting my novel published. But slap a fancy marketing label on it, and those steps become intimidating and scary.
I asked a couple of publishing-savvy acquaintances for their thoughts on the idea of an “author platform,” and they answered that a platform is pretty much required in non-fiction — you need to be an expert in the subject, have some sort of credentials, or some sort of story behind the story in order to get a non-fiction book out there. Fiction, however, is different. Fiction writers build their reputations — their platforms — by writing good books that people want to read. Fiction writers build their platform as they go.
What worries me about these lists and articles about building an author platform is that none of them include “write the best novel you can.” None of them advise authors to improve their craft, to write every day, to seek out critique groups, get advice, and learn how to revise their rough drafts. These articles seem to make the “author platform” sound like a magic bullet that will help an author break into publishing, and that the novel itself is peripheral. Selling a novel isn’t easy, and it sometimes seems like everyone is looking for that magic bullet or secret handshake that will make it easy. But like I tell myself almost every day, if it were easy, everyone would be doing it. It isn’t supposed to be easy.
Write the novel. Make it the best you can. Write another book. That’s what you should be spending the bulk of your time on. All that other stuff, like a good website and meeting other authors at workshops and conventions, may be helpful for building a career, but it isn’t going to replace what a writing career is really about — the writing. Go ahead and work on building an author platform. But remember that a platform is just a stage to support the show. Make sure your show is the best. Otherwise, the platform is useless.
