• Brooke Warner
  • 5 Platform-building Steps for Writers Who Are Ready to Get Noticed
This blog was featured on 07/20/2016
5 Platform-building Steps for Writers Who Are Ready to Get Noticed
Contributor

“I don’t want to be the poster girl for dysfunctional relationships,” my client told me. And yet her memoir was about a past dysfunctional relationship. She’d just spent a weekend at a writers’ conference where agents and editors she’d met with had helped her to brainstorm platform-building ideas that included writing articles and posts about the experiences in her memoir. She understood that she needed to build her platform for these same agents and editors to sign her on, and yet she was resisting their suggestions, explaining to me that she was not a one-trick pony. She didn’t want to be pigeonholed.

I’ve heard variations of this type of resistance from writers for years. And the complaint doesn’t only come from memoirists; novelists succumb to this way of thinking as well. They want to build their platforms, and understand that they have to if they want to get a book deal, and yet the idea of becoming an expert on the concepts or issues that are central to their book makes them bristle, or makes them feel somehow locked in. Or possible not seen for the whole of who they are.

Current publishing trends are such that writers need to have an author platform before an agent or editor will sign them on. An agent friend of mine told an audience at a panel we sat on together, “Get the TED talk first and then come talk to me.”

The only way to build an author platform when you’re starting out is to focus in on a topic, issue, or theme. This is straightforward when you’re writing nonfiction. Someone like Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, is a perfect example of someone with a strong single-topic platform. Her angle is specific — writing about, to, and for introverts — and yet broad enough that it includes a huge segment of the population.

Memoirists and novelists can replicate this kind of platform with the topics central to their own books, as long as they embrace the idea of being the “poster girl” or “poster boy,” at least for the time being.

An author platform is something that elevates your visibility, that makes you stand out above the crowd. You have to earn your way to becoming an Anne Lamott or a Roxanne Gay, writers who can opine on many topics and have ears of thousands of readers. This doesn’t happen overnight, nor does it happen with the success of just one book.

To those aspiring authors who want agents and editors to notice them, here are five steps to build and grow your platform:

1. Choose themes central to your book to write about, whether these are issues like homelessness, love addiction, or international travel, or themes, like resilience, grief, or forgiveness.

2. Focus in on your primary topics/themes for the next while. You can’t be pigeonholed if you don’t first have some success in the area you’re trying to break into, so try to avoid putting the cart before the horse. Come up with a list of ten potential blog posts on your single topic or theme and find your voice of authority. Own your issue or topic.

3. Set up Google alerts on your issue/topic/theme. Let Google curate lists for you about grief, for instance, or homelessness. If you have an issue like homelessness, set up Google alerts for “homeless” and “homelessness” and see what comes through. Adjust your keywords as necessary. Use Google alerts for inspiration for social media and blog posts, and to stay current on what’s trending within your topic.

4. Interact with your community. We all have tribes, to use Seth Godin’s term for our communities, and you need to find these people and start following them. If there are people out there doing what you aspire to be doing, follow them! Share their Facebook posts and retweet their tweets. You are not in competition with these people; they’re part of your same fraternity/sorority of brothers and sisters who share a similar goal — to spread a message about something that deeply matters to them.

5. Keep going. One of the most powerful messages I’ve ever heard on this topic came from Mark Nepo in an off-the-cuff comment he made to me when I asked him about his meteoric success after his book, The Book of Awakening, after it shot onto The New York Times best seller list. He said, “I’m glad I kept writing when no one was listening.” There may be a perception of a small audience. You may put your work out there and barely get a response. Maybe no one comments on your post. And yet, equally important is the body of work you are building. Don’t expect your early social media and blog posts to be liked or shared by hundreds. This is what you’re building toward, and it takes time. My agent friend was glib when he said to go out and get the TED talk first, but the deeper message there is to keep spreading your message until people take notice.

I’ve written elsewhere that platform is a marathon, not a sprint. I can’t think of many overnight success stories in the publishing world. Most successful authors can share tales of hard work, persistence, and long hours spent in pursuit of a their goals and dreams. Few debut authors become bestsellers. And even fewer authors are signing book deals without platforms in place. Yes, there are exceptions, but try not to measure your own failures or successes against these exceptions, as it can only lead to frustration.

Love your topic or issue enough to live with it for at least the next five years. And then, once you become a voice that people want to listen to, want to hear more from, then you’ll have the freedom to switch gears. Yes, you run the risk of getting pigeonholed with your first book, but focus on what this can bring you instead of how it will limit you. Because you do have to earn your way, and you do this by cultivating your expertise and becoming a go-to person, which requires focus and specificity — at least until you break out.

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Comments
  • The SheWrites.com blog is great, but most useful if and when your work is featured, and we're always looking for content to feature!

  • Thank you so much for this post and your list, Brooke.  It really does give me a whole new spin on the novel I am currently in the process of writing.  It will probably get written over the course of several NaNoWriMos or NaNoWriMo summer camps, between home-schooling, working day jobs, and practicing my musical instruments, but it'll get done....and I will.

    In terms of establishing a blog, my WordPress blog was compromised not long ago, along with  my iPage website.  Instead of starting all over again with them, I let them go and started a new one with weebly.: www.karenszklanygault.weebly.com.  Now I am thinking of starting a new blog.  Would using my SheWrites blog be enough, or should I choose another blogging host?  Perhaps I should call WordPress to see if I can recover the blog posts that I had already generated independently of iPage...or just start a new one with a new focus.

  • Doreen, good for you and yes, it takes about that long—at least!

  • @Deb: TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design. Love the title of your book!

  • So glad it was helpful, Maureen. Thanks for the comments, everyone. I see the need in so many of my clients and students (and published authors) to change their orientation around their own expertise.

  • This was a really affirming article to read. I love my themes of human resilience, and that we are all already good enough, and helping people heal their fear of death so much I want to champion them everywhere. It brings up the question for me why would anyone do the work it takes to write a whole book if they don't love the subject themes? I wonder if the book needs to be reworked to bring out the themes they do love. I also appreciate that platform building takes time. I sent a gift of my art book prototype to one of the top authors in my genre 6 months ago. I got a hand written card from him today saying he loved it! Super exciting for me!  

  • I'll be copying this into a file where I keep important articles on publishing! Thank you Brooke, so much!

  • J.A. Wright

    Google alerts are the best. I've discovered things, found helpful resources, and a few book reviews that I wouldn't have known about if I hadn't set up alerts. I'm going to set up another one today on women and homelessness - just to see what comes up. Thanks, Brooke. 

  • Laura Zera

    Oh my, I was just chewing on this exact thing on the phone with my agent an hour ago. We kind of reached an agreement that I would draw out issues and themes in my m/s and write on them, as well as write and submit off-topic pieces if they were just busting to get out of me and onto the paper, but without spending too much time on them. It's like everything: We only have so much time, and so we have to use that limited resource wisely.

  • Vicki Lyn Cody

    Thanks Brooke! Great advice and something to think about.

     

  • Useful guidance here! Thanks, Brooke.

  • RYCJ Revising

    oh, that opening was just priceless. (big grin) Summed up perfectly.

  • Maureen C. Berry

    Sorry, I don't know why the comment is duplicated.

  • Maureen C. Berry

    Thanks for this list Brooke. What resonated most for me was this, "Love your topic or issue enough to live with it for at least the next five years. And then, once you become a voice that people want to listen to, want to hear more from, then you’ll have the freedom to switch gears."

    Love your topic or issue enough to live with it for at least the next five years. And then, once you become a voice that people want to listen to, want to hear more from, then you’ll have the freedom to switch gears.

  • Deb

    What does TED stand for?

  • Catherine Hiller

    This post came at a good moment for me. My book Just Say Yes: A Marijuana Memoir was published last year, and since then I've been writing almost exclusively on the subject of cannabis, because I am asked to. Yet I don't want to be pigeonholed! And I hope that my "straight" fiction will also be appreciated! Brooke reminded me to be glad I'm known for something. And luckily there is still a great deal to write about weed. 

  • Shirley Dietz

    I think you are right. It even takes years (sometimes) to know what your focus is yourself, much less convey it to others.

  • Doreen Pendgracs

    Excellent article, Brooke. It is difficult and time consuming to build that desired author's platform. I've been building mine for the past seven years, and it's only now that people are coming to me as the expert in my field and that I can really see the results of the hard work I've put in. Thx for the encouragement! 

  • Eileen Flanagan

    Thanks, Brooke. This rings true to my experience both as someone who has been a writer for over twenty years and as someone whose focus has changed a lot over the last few years. I'm building a new tribe now, though my old body of work is still there and some of my old readers have followed me into a new focus.