Getting Published: Building Your Platform
What’s good, y’all? We’re going to be talking about a lot of things dealing with topics when it comes to writing. But not necessarily in any kind of order.
What we’re going to start with is something that you need to be doing before you write anyway, and pretty much all the time after that – building your platform.
Authors need to have a platform. Let me be honest, what you are selling isn’t your book. I mean, your writing is the most important thing as a writer, I can’t ever scream that enough. But what you’re selling is YOU, the person. Like Jay Z said, “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man.”
Publishers and publicists will roll out their resources to get you publicity for a book. They’ll try to get eyes on your work. But you need the ability to do a lot yourself because you can only ask them to do so much.
I’m not saying that becoming a global sensation is the trick to getting published. What I’m saying is that you need to be a good member of your community, whatever that community might be.
Join a writer’s group, an improv troupe, a knitting group, whatever. And get online. You don’t have to manage nine accounts across social media but find the ones where your audience is and become a member – a full member.
Write articles. Post photos, memes and content. If you write comedy, tell jokes on social media. If you write drama, talk family issues on Facebook. If you write romance, hit up those romance conferences.
Take Kristen Arnett, for example. She published a collection of short stories titled Felt in the Jaw with Split Lip Press in 2017. Her debut novel, Mostly Dead Things was published by Tin House in 2021.
In the time between, Arnett was a force on Twitter. She was straight up hilarious. She was witty as hell with her thoughts on life, books and Seven Eleven. We got to know her as a person, on a certain level, and most of us liked her. So, when that book came out in 2021, she hit the Times best seller list. Now, I’m not trying to say Twitter did that because she’s an excellent writer, but it didn’t hurt. She let us get to know her.
And that’s what I think we all need to do as authors. Writers need to get out to conferences, book launches, author readings, writer’s conferences. Join a writer’s group. It might sound like a lot, but it’s not. It’s just becoming a member of your community in the way that fits you best.
You can write articles on the different topics you write your fiction on. Get those published in journals or ezines or start a blog.
There are lots of different ways to get your name and face out there.
Let people know who you are because it’s that uniqueness in you to inhabits your work and makes it what it is. You’re the only person who can tell the stories you want to tell. So, let us know who you are. Show us something. If you can do that, we’re much more likely to support your work than we are if we have to rely on the back cover copy alone.