Building Your Author Platform
Building a platform as a new author can feel incredibly intimidating. The internet is a huge place, and with so many different and rapidly-evolving social media platforms, it can feel impossible to know where to start. However, building an author platform is a process. While it certainly takes work to create a large and thriving platform, it won’t happen overnight, so be patient!
Instead of trying to figure out the best platform, start with you! Ultimately, when it comes to building your platform, perspective and knowing your own personal availability and skill sets is everything. What social media platforms are you already active on? What social media platforms do you understand? That’s the best social media platform to help build the foundation for your growing platform. If you start building your public persona on a platform you’re familiar with and comfortable using, you’ll more naturally be able to speak to your growing audience and create engaging content to continue to draw new readers.
When you feel ready to expand into other social media outlets, consider the age demographic of your target readers and what social media platforms those folks tend to frequent. For instance, if your target reader tends to be an older individual, exploring newer social media platforms like TikTok might not be effective in drawing in readers. However, if you’re writing middle-grade or YA fiction, platforms like Facebook might not be the best place to grow your audience.
At the end of the day, social media is a dynamic and rapidly changing landscape. So instead of working to find proficiency in every corner of social media out there, start small in those places where you feel like you can really invest some time, creativity, and work to create an authentic and welcoming community.
Social media is only one piece of platform building. Talking with prospective readers online is great, but simply having a large following on one or several platforms doesn’t necessarily translate into book sales. Having a strong website with unique and interesting content, like a blog, vlog, or podcast, is essential to draw in readers. Luckily, building a website is pretty easy these days! While you can always hire someone to build a site for you, the growth of services like Squarespace and WordPress means it’s incredibly easy to build a professional-looking website with little to no technical knowledge
Once you’ve got your website, creating some sort of a magnet to draw readers to your website can not only help garner interest and prospective readers, it can help you capture emails. Depending on the genre of your writing, creating a workbook, a newsletter, a video series, a mini-lesson, or a novella that you deliver to readers for free in exchange for being added to an email list is a great way to introduce your content and your authorial voice to prospective readers in a low-pressure situation. Getting individuals to subscribe to your email list means that you now have a very direct way to keep the conversation going and keep them informed about any new developments in the progress of your book s like release dates and pre-order sales.
Whether you self-publish exclusively or eventually travel into the world of traditional or hybrid publishing, having a current, reliable, and dynamic place for readers to communicate with you, see what projects you’re working on, and continue to invest in your content is key. While building a platform from scratch can feel intimidating, take it one step at a time, and focus on creating authentic, interesting content that helps bolster the message of your book.