So, you want to publish a book.

Are you prepared to promote yourself before it’s even published?

Writers often tell me they hate to stand in the spotlight. Their favorite place is at the computer, alone, writing their book.

But how do you sell your book if no one, other than family and friends, know who you are?

 

In a Word, Platform.

Platform. The audience of people most likely to read your work. Your ideal reader. The people who would potentially buy your book.

I have a lot of conversations with writers about platform–defining it, helping them build one, and explaining why some activities build a platform better than others.

Social media comes up and depending on the age of the writer, is quickly shot down. It’s perceived to be an invasion of privacy, and a nag that requires constant content and attention.

That is all true. Social media can feel like a never-ending gig, and a nag, plus the thought of using social media to build your platform stresses people in all sorts of ways.

But as a platform-building tool, it works.

For social media to be less annoying, it needs to be managed, and that is a set of skills that are learned, and learning takes time you may not be willing to give it.

Let’s find some avenues for building platform that work for you. Let’s start with the most popular, and often described to me as “loud” social media sites.

Pick Your Social Media Sites Wisely

If you are already on Instagram, for instance, and love it, then stay there. Use it for more than food pics and your latest COVID photo. Agents, editors and readers hang out on “Insta,” so you would do well to build your image and author brand there. Don’t forget the hashtags. Lots and lots of hashtags. That’s how people find and follow you.

How about Twitter? If you want to follow and post tweets to your favorite authors, or pitch your query to agents—you can do that on Twitter. If you need to research agents and publishing houses, you can do that with Twitter’s search. It remains a super popular, maybe even the most popular, site by the publishing crowd—agents, editors, publishers, and ancillary companies regularly post on Twitter. You can research them all by using the Search function and seeing who’s saying what.

Don’t join Twitter if you don’t want to read about politics because you will get up-to-the-minute posts on all things political and it may upset your day, unless politics is what you write about.

And, yes, to be seen and heard on Twitter, you need to post multiple times per day. In other words, you need to be all in to benefit. But developing a following is not that hard and those stats rank well as part of your platform. Consider it, but I have some other platform-building suggestions for you.

A Social Media Site That’s Manageable . . . and Quiet

What if you were allowed to write essays, or short stories, maybe an article with links to sites that support your argument? It’s a social site, but you don’t hang out in a moving timeline of shared posts—your writing will receive comments and likes only.

You can even become a partner with the site to have your very best posts shared to members, read, and you receive a payment? That makes the site quiet, not at all hectic. There are zero moving images or advertising posts in the margins. Just a platform of written work (accompanied by static photos).

I’m talking about Medium.com, which is a great way to build an audience. Medium.com is a free public blogging site. I recommend Medium because it’s easy to get started and it receives amazing traffic. When you use keywords in your title and body copy, you’ll get visitors to your writing.

I would put your best work on the site—not chapters of your book because agents and publishers want unpublished work and once you press Share on your article, it’s officially published—and it will be more like posting to your own blog than it will be posting to a fast-paced site. I suggest you add a boilerplate paragraph at the bottom of your posts with links to your own blog so people, readers, can find you easily online.

LinkedIn.com offers posts, but also long-form articles. I highly recommend that you take advantage of posting on LinkedIn, including long-form articles.

Register for an account and then poke around. You’ll notice a timeline, much like Facebook, but fewer to zero posts about people’s summer vacations, unless it’s tied to their career or business.

This is a business networking site, after all. And, a great place to share content. Why?

1. Because it contains millions of members who could see your content

2. Google loves LinkedIn because it’s filled with great content. Your posts on LinkedIn help you rank on Google. If you are already active on LinkedIn, search on your name and see where your LinkedIn profile pops up in relation to your website and any other platform you’re active on.

If you’re a fiction writer, specifically a writer of short stories, check out The Writing Cooperative, which accepts and publishes short fiction on its site: https://writingcooperative.com/the-writing-cooperative-submission-requirements-364b0fea36cd.

Yes, even fiction writers benefit from a platform and having short stories, essays, and other representative work published on third-party sites, is a plus. Someone searching on your name will see that you’ve been published in Slate.com, Modern Love or any of a number of New York Times newsletters.

What Next?

So, today, sit down, take a deep breath. If you want to write a book, think of platform building as less a necessary evil and more of a fun way to share your writing.

Pick several topics in your area of expertise, and jot them down. These should be juicy, important work for you to write about. They should be things that elevate your spirit. They could be topics you include in your book–a taste of what a reader can expect from you.

Decide how you want to share your topics, some of which are around 200 words max, and some are longer articles of 500 or more words.

One trick I recommend to my clients is to post first to the site where you want to get the most traffic. So, post on your blog first. Wait a few days for google to index your new content, and then copy and paste your blog post to LinkedIn. Wait a few days and pull your article from your blog into Medium. Com.

It’s a trifecta that gets more people reading, commenting and sharing your work. This is one effective way to build your platform.

How are you building your platform?