All the world’s a platform!

Publishing these days, from everything I’ve been reading, involves massive amounts of marketing on the part of the author.  You need media savvy, business acumen, and a vast array of skills that don’t actually seem to be related to writing.  I’m of two opposing positions on this new change, but here I’m going to pretend that I’m not feeling personally violated in the slightest.  Nope, not at all.  Nunh unh.  Instead, I’m going to try to convince myself that the process of developing a personal platform is sparkling with the fairy dust of inspiration, and glittering with pure potential.  Because it is, and in an odd way, it’s exhilarating.

So, what is this platform thing I’ve been ambling on about?  Glad you asked.

At its most fundamental level, your author platform is you.

Building from that base, your platform is how you present yourself, your personal strengths, and your writerly arts to the external world.  Your expertise, if you don’t mind me slipping into the marketing jargon I’ve been reading too much of lately.

Disclaimer: I’m just at the ground level (ridiculously grandiose exaggeration) of platform building myself, and I’m still trying to get my brain around how it’s done.  But I can point you to the books that have really helped me understand the process.

1. The Productive Writer by Sage Cohen

If you’re even thinking of trying to become published or working in any capacity as a professional writer, I highly recommend this book.  It also should have been the book I began with first when I was trying to understand author marketing and the platform-building process.  Sage Cohen’s writing walks an elegant line between the practical and inspirational, and for that alone I’d recommend this book even without her excellent overview of what platform building actually is.

In short, start here.  You’ll receive a solid basis and context for understanding a lot of the more concrete advice in Sell Your Book Like Wildfire, and Get Known Before the Book Deal.  Likely, you might be inspired enough to want to build a platform.  As it was, I’d already read the latter book, and had developed a thick crust of cynicism and annoyance.  This book washed it away in a tide of new ideas, and helped me to understand that a platform could actually serve well as both a professional and life guide.

Note: Turn off your inner editor when flipping through this book at a local bookstore.  For some reason, the horse’s “reins” are consistently spelled like a king’s “reign.”  I almost didn’t buy the book for that reason, and I’d have probably regretted that forever.

2. Sell Your Book Like Wildfire by Rob Eagar

I’m kind of torn in recommending this book over Get Known Before the Book Deal.  To be perfectly honest, the information within both books is quite similar, though Eagar’s book is more comprehensive.  Both rely on a fair amount of marketing jargon, but Eagar’s is probably a little more impenetrable; understandable considering this is fundamentally a business book first and a writing book second.  If you read this book, you probably won’t need Get Known, and I highly recommend you do.  I’m hugely biased though: this book reads like a professional effort, and not like a “chatty” self-help book the way Get Known does.

Eagar covers every aspect of platform building for both fiction (yay!) and nonfiction writers, from media interviews to newsletters, to guerrilla marketing tactics.  And he does it in concrete steps that are reasonably easy to follow.  The one drawback is his emphasis on shelling out huge amounts of money for professional web design, videotaping of speaking engagements, etc.  You’d have to be wealthy to afford everyone he suggests hiring.  That said, he’s clear that you don’t have to do everything in the book to build a respectable platform.

If you want to know everything there is to know about creating a platform, this is your book.

Note:  The term “leader” is used a lot in this book before Eager finally defines what he means in the second-to-last chapter.  He’s referring to the decision-makers in any group setting: managers, executives, church pastors and the like.

3. (tentative) Get Known Before the Book Deal by Christina Katz

I’m going to admit right off the bat that this book royally ticked me off.  It’s probably unfair, but there’s something in the author’s style that really, really annoys me.  The “chattiness” I referred to earlier isn’t the chatting of a friend to another friend, but that of a parent to a child, with that same hint of condescension and lecturing.  That put me right off the book, even if I did read it cover to cover.  The personality is thick in this book, while Eagar tends to back away and usually lets the facts do the talking.

If either of the examples below doesn’t bother you, or actually helps you somehow, you might want to choose Katz’ book over Eagar’s.  Otherwise, go with Sell Your Book Like Wildfire.  There’s enough overlap in material that you won’t miss out if you only read one of the two.

• “The problem for writers who want a leg up today isn’t the state of the world, the unstable economy, or even the climate in the publishing industry… The problem isn’t (if you have one of these) your editor, your agent, your publisher or even your publisher’s publicist…  The problem just might be, my dear fellow writer, you…  Specifically your attitude.”
• Exercise for establishing your platform: “Have you ever imagined yourself as an action figure?  Want to imagine yourself as an action figure?  Go to [website] and browse the action figures, and then describe yours.  What props does your action figure have?”

Katz makes a huge deal of the concept of “authenticity” in this book, and if that resonates with you, you’ll probably connect to it better than I did.  Despite the constant reminder to always be genuine when interacting with the outer world through your platform, I found the book to feel very inauthentic, in that Katz seems to have a clear platform-defined persona which she keeps under tight restraint.

That said, there’s a lot of valuable information in this book, and if you can read past the platform spin better than I can, you’ll get a lot out of it.

Note: If you really do want to see platform in action, read this book.  This book is clearly a product of Christina Katz’ platform, a real-life case study in what something engineered specifically for platform-expanding purposes might look like.

If you’ve been wondering what to read to get your brain around marketing and platform-building, I hope I’ve helped cut down your potential list just a little.