Recently, a delightful person asked me if I have author platform. If you haven’t encountered the term, platform refers to public awareness of, and the potential guessable audience for, a writer. Platform matters because it’s common now for publishers to insist on seeing evidence of platform before signing. I give a lot of publishing talks and “What is platform and how do I get it” has become the most common question I hear.
My immediate response to the question of whether I have platform is, not too much, probably. I write for the Huffington Post, Ms., the New York Times, The Hill and other places that many people see. But if you look up articles on building author platform—and their name is Legion, for they are many—what I’ve got in that direction is small beer. Small as in like the cups you get when you order a craft beer flight. The checklist for platform generally includes multiple publications in large media, with a sense of expertise on particular subjects. For the media, I generally write in some way about neurodiversity and my call to rethink psychiatric practice. Lately I wrote on bipolarity and Britney Spears. This is the check on my list.
But the rest of author platform is: very widely followed blog and social media; e-newsletter; regular speaking engagements; maybe running a podcast; doing radio. One article on platform mentioned enthusiastically that it would be great to be Jon Stewart . . . which it totally would, except not for those reasons.
Let’s see, hours in a day, meet author platform. I hope you get along, but you probably won’t. There’s always rolling out new content to keep those followers following. Constant pitching. It’s true you can hire publicists to do some of this work, but it’s costly and before you can, you’d likely need to have had the book success platform can give you.
So here’s my honest talk: I once had a book of mine featured in a publication that had more than 30,000,000 readers. It was an article pulled partially from the book, addressing its subject, and a little image of my adorable book cover sat at the bottom of the page.
And that book sold terribly. I don’t know why. I got many many emails, letters, and even a couple of phone calls from people who loved that article. They just didn’t buy the book. It flummoxed—and deeply annoyed—my editors, who sent their annoyance my way pretty quickly. Real talk is that platform makes great sales much more likely, but it’s no guarantee. And for a neurodiverse person like me, doing constant mega-events flashing my Jon Stewart vibe is a nonstarter.
So maybe the most useful thing I can suggest is this: pick what really matters to you from the platform checklist—it may be nothing—and commit to it, but mostly because it will nourish you. When I pitch articles, I pitch articles about subjects I want others to consider, or reconsider. Learn how to write a good pitch letter (I’m happy to do a pitch letter post if anyone out there is interested) and think about what you’re passionate about, if this sounds right for you. Do a fun blog, if that’s your thing. Or do everything on the checklist, because you want to. And then find your balance. Breathe.