The Best Way To Build A Writer's Platform Is To Write

Dean Wesley Smith holds that writers should write. Period. Sure "promotion can help book sales when done right and for the right reasons" but Dean advises authors:

Don't bother. Keep writing and selling. (The New World of Publishing: Promotion)

Don't promote, just write

That advice flies in the face of much of what independent writers have been told (for instance the advice John Locke gives in his book, How I Sold 1 Million Ebooks in 5 Months) so if you're skeptical I don't blame you. That said, best-selling author Erin Kern is a great example of what Dean's talking about.  First, though, here's what Dean says in his own words:

Put your story out on the market either to editors or readers and forget it and focus forward on learning and writing more stories. It can’t hurt you to have them out. No one will read them if they are a stinking pile of crap. So no big deal.

And if you happened to have gotten close to a story that works, then readers will pay you money for it without you doing a thing to push them. And you will then know and can take credit for writing a good story.

And when that happens, take the credit. You will deserve it.

Keep writing and learning and writing and learning and writing and learning.

There will be enough time down the road for promotion of the right book.

And keep having fun. (The New World of Publishing: Maybe You Wrote a Good Book)

In short, the best thing you can do as a writer to help sell your work is to write. Rather than spending time and money to market your last book, write a new one.

Dean Wesley Smith knows what he's talking about. He has written hundreds of books (I'm including his ghostwritten stories) and worked successfully in a high-risk, turbulent industry, for at least 30 years.

As part of my series on building a writer's platform I want to examine what Dean says about marketing and how it applies to platform building, but here's the short version. (And please keep in mind this is just my opinion.)

I think constantly writing stories, constantly putting new work out on the market (whether you submit work to editors or publish it yourself) is a smart way of building a platform! I don't think writing and platform building are separate; rather, they are two sides of the same coin.

For instance, if you write a horror story and it sells well you're branding yourself--or at least that pen name--as a horror writer. This happened to Stephen King. His first big book was Carrie and that went a long way to brand him, not only as a writer of horror, but of a certain kind of horror. The creepy, oh-my-gosh-I-can't-look-away white-knuckle kind.

Skeptical? Let's take a look at Erin Kern's fabulous success story.

Erin Kern

When Erin Kern published her first book, Looking For Trouble, she sold one copy in two weeks, and that was to her husband! She writes:

The first month Looking for Trouble was published (October 2010) I sold about 10 copies. The next month I sold 12.

And that was with lots of marketing. And when I say lots, I mean some reviews from romance websites, and the occasional feature.

Erin published Looking For Trouble in October 2010. Six months later the book started to take off and Erin saw the book's Amazon ranking steadily improve. What changed? Erin writes:

But my sales did eventually take off. In April 2011 I started seeing a steady uphill climb in ranking. By then I’d all but quit marketing and was basically working on my next book. In fact, the only change I’d made was the price of the book.

I lowered it from $2.99 to $.99.

The point? What sold the book was the book and finding the right price point. Erin writes:

To make a long story short, Looking for Trouble was on the Amazon top 100 for 4 months. Sometime in June, the book peaked at #6 in the paid Kindle store, and #1 on three different lists. In that month alone, I sold 38,000 copies. What was I doing to sell all these books?

Nothing.

The higher ranked your book is, the more exposure you get. Readers brows the bestseller lists all the time to see who they should read next.

Erin speculates that the self published book is the new query letter because it can get you noticed by agents, editors and publishers.

So, what's the truth about making it as a writer in this new age of digital publishing? Erin sums it up nicely:

You just have to write a great book (actually more than one would be helpful). My second book, Here Comes Trouble, was in the Amazon top 100 2 weeks after I published it.

Great advice! To write a great book, you have to write a lot and write regularly. It's a simple recipe for success but far from easy to follow.

I heartily recommend Erin Kern's article, Are Self-Published Books the New Query Letter?

Other articles you might like:
- Penelope Trunk: Blogging And Branding
- Building A Platform That Meets Your Needs
- Jim Butcher Begins Another Series, The Cinder Spires: It's Steampunk!

Articles referenced:
- Are Self-Published Books the New Query Letter?, by Erin Kern
- The New World of Publishing: Promotion, by Dean Wesley Smith
- The New World of Publishing: Maybe You Wrote a Good Book, by Dean Wesley Smith

Photo credit: Pascal Maramis

Building A Platform That Meets Your Needs

A while ago I wrote an article entitled: How To Build A Platform: Why Every Writer Needs A Website, in which I argued that just having a blog wasn't good enough, you need a website too.

These days, I'm not so sure. I think having a blog, even a blog on Blogger.com, might be good enough. Here's the thing: What you need depends on what your goals are.

What is the main thing folks are going to come to your website/blog for? And who are these folks going to be? You might be staring at these words shaking your head, thinking, "And how the heck would I know who's going to come and visit my site?"

That's a fair question. Often in the beginning we don't know who these folks, our visitors and, ultimately, our readers, are going to be.

Come one, come all

Whether you decide to go with a static site, a blog or a full-blown website (I talk more about this later) you'll need to keep at it. The key phrase here is: be consistent.

Naturally if all you're going to be putting up is a static site--a webpage with information about who you are, where you can be reached (Twitter, Facebook, etc.)--then being consistent is fairly easy. You just need to update the page every six months or so, or when something changes (you put out a new book, become active in new forms of social media, and so on). Otherwise, there isn't much to do!

If you don't know who your visitors are going to be you can still design a website. I'll go into more detail later, but there are roughly three broad kinds of sites you can put up. I call them the starter package, the starter package plus blog and the full-featured site.

As the name implies, the most basic of these is "the starter package". This is a static website that simply tells visitors how to reach you, where you are on the web (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), what you've written and how to contact you. If this is all you want, blogger.com or wordpress.com would likely meet your needs. Make sure, though, that the service you choose allows you to use your own domain name (blogger.com does and wordpress.com does but you need to pay a fee). That's a must. Why? If you ever decide to move your site from, say, wordpress.com, to another hosting site, your readers will be able to find you at you new home through your domain name.

By the way, I know it might seem like a contradiction in terms to recommend blogging sites for a static site! As it happens, you can set blogger.com up as a static site (I should probably write a blog post about how to do that) and I imagine the same is true for wordpress.com as well. The great thing about starting off with a site like blogger.com is that it does all the search engine optimization (SEO) for you and can list your site with all the major search engines.

If you want to be slightly more ambitious, you could go with a "starter package plus blog" and blog regularly (keep in mind that if you blog once a month you're blogging regularly!). You can blog even if you don't know what sort of audience you're reaching out to, just talk about whatever interests you. Over time you'll see themes emerge. Also, after looking at your viewer statistics, you'll notice your readers are more interested in certain articles, certain themes, than others. After a few months you'll get a feel for what you like to blog about and also what your readers are interested in.

If, in the beginning, you don't have an idea who your audience will be then I wouldn't advise you starting off with what I'm calling a full-featured site. The way I think of it, a full-featured website one that is dynamic and easily customizable, you likely would have a blog and could even have forums or open an online store! (For example, stephenking.com)

But with a full-featured site you'll also have additional concerns. This kind of site can do a lot but, as with everything, there are tradeoffs. For instance, the more cool features you add (e.g., link tracking), the slower the site will run. A few bells and whistles may not make a difference but at some point you'll wonder why your pages are loading slowly. Also, this sort of site is complex and complex things tend to break. If you can fix it yourself, great! Otherwise maintenance can be expensive. Either way, maintaining this kind of a site is time consuming.

You have an idea who your visitors will be

We've just discussed how to go about building a site if you don't know who your target audience is. Now let's talk about how to build a site when you have some idea what kind of a community you want to build.

Shared interest
How do you build community? You reach out to those who share an interest of yours. It could be anything. What are you interested in? Steampunk? Scifi movies of the 80s? Doctor Who? Skiboarding? Cooking? Hiking? Whatever it is, there are people, lots of people, just as passionate about it as you are. The trick is letting them know your site exists.

By the way, when I said you could build your site around any theme/idea that was a bit of an exaggeration. What you write about has to have some connection to the shared interest you've built your community around. For instance, if you write science fiction, by all means, talk about scifi movies, conventions, trivia. Talk about collectibles. Even talk about other scifi writers! Eventually, if you keep at it, a community will form.

Cookbooks are popular. They sell well. Why? The tie-in between a writer's community and how to reach that community is obvious. You write books about food and it is very easy to blog about food, post pictures of food, conventions, good places to eat in your local community and across the country, and so on.

I mean, who doesn't like beautiful close-up pictures of desserts? Especially chocolate ones. (Oh my gosh, if I wrote cookbooks I would gain SO much weight. Anyway, moving on.)

Making the connection between your area of interest and your community
How do you make the connection between what you are interested in--for instance, mystery stories with sleuths who cook--and building a community? 

Interaction

 
If I could I would have that word, "interaction", blink red and blue and have big yellow dancing arrows pointing to it. But that's not a surprise, is it? That's how me make friends. Interaction forms the basis for any social endeavor. And that really is the other key word: social. I'm talking about building a community, not a list. For that to happen, for a community to form, there has to be interaction.

And that means you need to find a way to interact with the people who you would like in your community.

I think I'm going to leave it there for today. I covered more material than I thought I would. In the next segment I'll talk about interaction and social media but I want to say here that I don't think social media is necessary for you to form and interact with a community.

Good writing!

Other articles in this series:
- What Is A Writer's Platform?
- Does Every Writer Need A Platform?

Other articles you might like:
- Jim Butcher On Writing
- NaNoWriMo: 5 Tips On How To Get Ready
- On The Art Of Creating Believable Characters: No Mr. Nice Guy
- Perfection Is The Death Of Creativity

Photo credit: "KIUKO"

Jane Friedman: How To Build An Awesome Twitter Bio

It is impossible to overemphasize the importance of Twitter in building my author platform. My Twitter Bio is my public face on Twitter, it's the first thing folks see and also what they use when deciding if I'm the sort the tweeter they want to follow.

Every writer owes it to themselves to make their Twitter bio the absolute best it can be. Enter Jane Friedman and her blog post

Jane breaks the Twitter bio into four components:

1. Photo
2. Name and handle
3. 160 character bio
4. Link

Jane Friedman goes into much more detail, here is the Coles Notes version:

1. Photo
- Clear and closely cropped image of your face
- High contrast

2. Name and handle
Name: Use your real name or a pen name. This is part of your platform so you want people to be able to find you easily.
Handle: You probably won't be able to come close to your real name, don't worry about it. Just pick something easy to remember and type.
Tip: Jane suggests not putting "author" as part of either your name or your handle.

3. 160 character bio
Bad:
- Inspirational quotes or aphorisms
- Excess marketing
- A description that is so general it could fit anyone.
Good:

- Tell people what you do. If you're a writer, tell them that.
- Let people know what you'll be tweeting about.
- Add some personality. People like humor.

Jane writes:

As far as that third item [add some personality], it’s popular for people to mention their hometowns or states, the universities they graduated from, or other things we share in meet-and-greet environments. That little bit of personality is more often than not what starts a conversation on Twitter. For me, it’s bourbon and usually my city of residence. (I do highly advocate listing your location—again, it’s likely to spark more connections.)

 Jane's bio is excellent. Here it is:

I share links on writing, publishing & tech. Web editor for @vqr + former publisher of @writersdigest. Bourbon lover & Hoosier native.

Charlottesville, VA, USA · http://janefriedman.com  

4. Link

Leave a link to your digital home. For most folks this will be a website or perhaps a blog. If you don't have a digital home and you're a writer hoping to sell your work, what are you waiting for? Get one! (This article may help: How To Build A Platform: Why Every Writer Needs A Website.)

To read the rest of Jane Friedman's article click here: Build a Better Author Bio for Twitter.

Jane's article inspired me to revamp my Twitter bio. If you'd like to see it, click here. While you're there say hi, I love hearing from readers. :-)

Other articles you might be interested in:
- 19 Ways To Grow Your Twitter Following
- Twylah: Turn Your Tweets Into A Blog
- Aherk! Makes Writing App 'Write Or Die' Look Tame

Lulu.com: New Author Advice Tool

UPDATE (July 1, 2012):
My apologies. I read the original article from Digital Book World in a hurry and thought that Lulu.com, a legitimate company that helps authors self-publish, had added certain 'author solutions' to its site. Unfortunately, on closer inspection, that is not the case.

As Paul pointed out in his kind comment, and as I have known for a while myself, Author Solutions has been flagged by Writer Beware a number of times and I would not recommend it.

Here is what Writer Beware has to say about Author Solutions:

Some POD services have trouble with timeliness in book production and order fulfillment. The companies owned by Author Solutions (AuthorHouse, iUniverse, Xlibris, and Trafford) are the subject of frequent complaints about customer service. Before choosing a POD service, it’s a good idea to scout for complaints, and to contact writers who’ve used the service. (From POD Service Issues To Consider)

There are many legitimate print-on-demand services (such as lulu.com, createspace.com and lightningsource.com) that help authors by enabling them to produce, distribute and sell paper copies of their work and I feel good about recommending any of these companies. Author Solutions is not a company I would recommend.

Because I don't like deleting things, my original article is below.

UPDATE (July 3, 2012):
Here is a link to another post on Writer Beware about AuthorSolutions:
Victoria Strauss -- Author Solutions Acquires Xlibris

--------------

This is from Digital Book World:

In the continuing arms race between self-publishing platforms, Lulu.com has added a new feature designed to entice authors.

Lulu’s Publishing Advisor is designed to give authors customized recommendations on how they can most effectively create, publish, market and sell their title. The recommendations are customized based on the author’s answers to a five-question questionnaire.

Lulu.com is just one of a number of self-publishing tools recently to go to market with improved services and pricing to attract more authors.

Author Solutions is currently offering authors 100% royalties in perpetuity on books published through the site by July 4. The company is also offering authors a something called BookStubs where authors can distribute physical cards with a code for readers to download their e-book to enable in-person e-book sales or giveaways.

A new company called Your Ebook Team just launched and says that it offers authors “360 degree” service, from editorial to distribution.

Major publishing companies are also now reaching out to authors to tout their ability to serve them. Random House, for instance, recently put out a video discussing all the value it offers to authors.

You can read the rest here: Self-Publishing Site Lulu.com Launches Author Advice Tool.

How To Build A Platform: Why Every Writer Needs A Website

It's time for another series! This time I'm going to discuss how a writer can build a platform, what a platform is and why she/he would want to build one. We're going to start off small, though, so today I'm going to write about why I think every writer needs a website.

How To Build A Platform, Part 1: Why Every Writer Needs A Website

The question of whether a writer needs a website is close to my heart because it's one I struggled with. I now believe that the answer is a resounding "Heck ya!".  And this is coming from someone who went the other way and started off with a blog and no website.

Why did I go with a blog first and plan to develop my website later? Honestly, and perhaps counter-intuitively, it's because I have a background in website development and was tired of building sites--I'd put that life behind me--so I decided, this time, I'd let Blogger.com do all the work.

For the record I love my blog. I mean that. I love it, but it's just not enough. I realize now that I need a website too. (That said, my blog isn't going anywhere, it will always be here at blog.karenwoodward.org, but my website will be site.karenwoodward.org and run off a hosting service. But enough about me.)

a. Why writers need a website and not just a blog
When I first started writing in earnest I began a blog on Blogger. This blog. And, as I said, I love my blog.

Blogger has been very good to me. It has automatically added certain tracking features that, when I took out my free Google Analytics account, showed up and gave me helpful information.

Since I had no idea what I was doing in the beginning--I hadn't even heard of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)--Blogger helped save me from myself, got me indexed with Google and Bing and whatever other search engines are out there. Also, Blogger gave me a great dashboard and made available many articles about how to make the best use of its features and it pointed me toward a great, free, book on SEO that Google had put out.

In other words, blogger held my hand and helped me get up to speed. And I'm saying that, even so, you will eventually need a website.


b. The difference between a website and a blog
A blog is something that gets updated frequently while a website (which may or may not contain a blog) is more about establishing a permanent presence on the web.

It's your website's domain name (for instance, www.mysite.com) you'll list on your business cards and your website is where you'll do things like:

- keep information about each of your books,
- have links to where folks can buy your work,
- host a series of articles,
- have a tab for your current promotion or
- host a page that has information about your next book.

Could you do all these things on Blogger? Theoretically, yes. But you wouldn't have the kind of control a content management system like WordPress can give you.

In another post we'll discuss content management systems as well as the pros and cons of using WordPress. Stay tuned!

Update: For more articles on how to build a platform, click here: Building A Writer's Platform

Cheers.

Other articles you might like:
- How To Start A Blog
- How To Format A Word Document For Amazon's KDP Publishing Program
- 7 Tips On How To Get Your Guest Post Accepted

Photo credit: "NY" by Missi under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0

"How To Build A Platform: Why Every Writer Needs A Website," copyright© 2012 by Karen Woodward.

The New Author Platform

Lately I have been obsessing over how to build that most mysterious of things: a platform. It, apparently, involves blogging and tweeting regularly. But it feels as though I should be doing something more. But what?

Alan Rinzler writes that:

It’s still about visibility, but today’s approach has changed. The New Author Platform requires a focus on developing an unobstructed back and forth between authors and their readers, with the authors — not the publishers — controlling the flow. Now it’s the author, not a publicist, who inspires readers to buy the book. The New Author Platform allows not only well-established authors, but unknown, first-time beginners to do an end run around the conservative gate-keepers and reach readers directly.

Here are Alan Rinzler's tips:

Personality

Successful authors today are designing websites filled with their work-in-progress, writing frequently updated blogs, tweeting, and shooting home-style, brief videos to post on their sites and on YouTube. They’re offering original content in samples and chunks, with invitations for feedback, and taking every opportunity to comment and join forums and other online venues on topics that relate to their own work.

In this way, they’re creating a public face that represents who they are and what they want to say.

Authenticity

Readers like to know and trust an author before buying their book. An artificial, smiley-face false front won’t do the trick. Instead, authors need to extend their literary skills to create a genuine bona-fide online persona that has human quirks, dimension, and nuance. You can be funny, cranky, indignant, nostalgic, didactic.

As long as you’re honest and persuasive, you have a better chance of getting potential readers interested to the point where they make the final commitment and put their money down.

Expertise

Authors don’t need to be full professors at Harvard to contribute useful comments and information online. Post brief sections from your book, and take social networking seriously by commenting and tweeting to build your reputation and visibility. This is true whether your subject is science and technology, history and biography, food and cooking, parenting and relationships, really any subject in any genre, and whether you’re a fiction or non-fiction writer.

Consider yourself a public service resource in the field you’re writing about. Your reputation and expertise will flourish in proportion to the value of the content you offer.

Subtlety

A cardinal rule of the new author platform is never to actually ask people to buy your book. Rather promulgate your work by making an enduring connection. Establish an authentic online personality, offer valuable information, analysis, opinion, and inspiring entertainment.

These are the elements of the New Author Platform that will ultimately sell your book.

What I found especially useful were the examples at the end of Mr. Rinzler's article where he gives examples of authors who have built sites that exhibit the characteristics he discusses.

Here is a link to the article: The "New Author Platform" -- What you need to knnow

Thanks to The Book Designer for the link.