For Want of a Platform

I first came across the concept of an author’s platform about 5 or 6 years ago. A submission editor with a book publisher used this phrase in an email she sent me explaining why she had decided to reject my manuscript for publication. “We really like your work but we looked you up online and didn’t see any reference to you or your work. It seems you don’t have an author’s platform. We only publish work by authors with an established platform.”

Initially I was non-plussed and unsure what she meant. I had never heard the word platform used this way, although from the context I inferred that this editor (and her publisher) thought I lacked any visible reputation or standing as an author or expert. In that way, an author’s platform seemed to be nothing more than a modern-day equivalent of a way to demonstrate your bona fides and display your work, like a fish-monger's wagon, a suitable platform from which to hawk your wares. “You are nobody to us,” she seemed to be saying, “without a platform.” The whole idea struck me as vaguely ridiculous – yet another obstacle thrown in the path of an unpublished author, and a real Catch 22. Of course as a first time author I didn’t have an author’s platform. That was precisely why I was sending my manuscript to a publisher in the first place.

But setting aside my personal pique at having my manuscript rejected on such nebulous grounds, the concept of an author’s platform stuck with me. In fact, I couldn’t get it out of my head. Whatever it was, I didn’t have one. And apparently that’s what I needed if I wanted to get my book published. So I decided to go about setting up a platform for myself, one way or another. And the first step, I realized, is that I had to figure out what an author’s platform was.

I started of course with a Google search. Now today if you search on the term “author platform” you will find a number of relevant hits, from web sites that offer to sell or build you your own platform for just $299, to recent articles from Writers Digest about how you too can sell more books and achieve overnight success by building your own platform in 5 easy steps. But this was back in 2009 or 2010, before the concept of an authors’ platform had attained enough currency to become a staple of trade publishing listicals and web commerce. Back then there was really nothing to be found online either explaining it or offering to sell me one. So the only option was to tackle it in the manner of the Little Red Hen, that is to say to figure it out and build it by myself.

I am incredibly glad that I did. Of course I ended up wasting a lot of time and effort as I bumbled my way through one experiment after another, starting with my first blog, which soon blossomed into a website, before branching out into an email newsletter and various other social media experiments, which eventually led to a redesign and update of the entire website to include audio and video components. But with all the bumbling around, I ended up learning a tremendous amount along the way. And more importantly I ended up with a much different understanding not so much of what an authors’ platform is but about how useful it can be, far beyond what I would have discovered had it even been an option back then for me to pay someone else $299 to build it for me. Indeed, that whole process of trial and error gave rise to an important number of insights that I will share with you over the course of the ensuing blogspots and chapters, foremost among them being that a platform – whether for an author, a lawyer or whomever — should not simply be approached for the limited purpose of creating visibility for oneself and one's work.  This is the concept of an authors' platform as it tends to be narrowly conceived and utilized in the publishing industry; a platform simply consists of assorted means and tools an author uses for purposes of self-promotion.  

But as I was soon to discover in my own stumbling way, this kind of self-promotion turns out to be a relatively small part of what a platform is capable of achieving for you and your work.  If you are going to build a platform for yourself it only makes sense to do so in the most robust way by conceiving and developing it as a practice platform - although there were still a few steps to take in the development of this path of reasoning before I could begin to imagine how any such thing could possibly be accomplished.