What is an Author Platform?
At MSB, we aim to make traditional publishing more equitable and diverse by sharing our industry expertise freely. I want to start off this new year by answering the most commonly asked questions that my team and I get about our work.
What is an author platform?
I like to think of an author platform as who you can uniquely sell to.
It’s a built-in audience for your content and also your ability to market and promote your future book to a target audience of potential readers. The reason I choose to work with entrepreneurs and experts is because y’all need a platform to promote your work. The trick is that often, the size of an audience that an entrepreneur or expert needs to succeed is much smaller than what literary agents and traditional publishers want to see.
There are four categories to an author platform. Keep in mind that every author’s platform is unique. There’s not one “right” way or mix of these that guarantees success.
Press/Media
Interviews/profiles/mentions, TV, radio, blogs, and podcasts (guesting and hosting)
Audience (Email List / Social Media)
If your book was out tomorrow, how many people could you tell about it?
How many fans do you have? And out of that, how many are buyers?
Reach
How many friends and colleagues will help promote your book upon publication?
(And — more importantly — how many followers and fans does that add to your audience?)
Speaking and Corporate Clients
Could you potentially get an order of 25, 50, or even 100 books from a client or to sell in the back of a room at an event? And if so, how often?
It’s important for you to know that platform building is a process that never really ends for entrepreneurs and experts. What I’ve learned over the past year or so is that the dream of getting a book published isn’t enough for many people to do all this hard work.
You need to be passionate about the book and your business and the people you serve. When you have that combination, it can be a joy to build an author platform because you’re not seeing the work as a means to an end (i.e., “I have to build my author platform in order to get my book published”) but rather as part of the process (I build my platform so I can grow my audience, grow my business, and have my book published).
