The Practice 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 sa...

What is your practice?  What is mine?  For that matter, what does practice really mean? Practice is one of those words so loaded in nuance it runs the risk of being misused if not rendered a bit meaningless at times.   These days it seems everyone has a practice.   For doctors and lawyers their practice can prove to be quite lucrative, ice hockey players practice on ice, while baseball players prefer natural grass; Jesuit priests and Zen monks take their practices to spiritual heights whereas painters and poets think in far more creative terms.   Even philosophers get in on the practice racket, although they more often refer to it as praxis , and use it as a term so general in meaning it has the potential to subsume all these other usages. In thinking about the range of practices we encounter these days, it’s helpful to distinguish at least four distinct qualities that may characterize a given practice at any given time:   (i) the extent to which i...

Throughout my career, such as it's been, I've pursued a number of very different and seemingly unrelated occupations.  Not including various summer and part time jobs I held while making my way through high school, college and law school, I can count at least 6 disparate careers that have kept me busy over the course of the last 30 years, having worked as a lawyer, a publisher, a dot com entrepreneur, a distressed debt trader, a marketing consultant and now, in my latest incarnation, as a writer, poet and translator.  What a long strange trip it has been. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American in my age cohort  -- having just turned 60 last year -- will hold 12 different jobs over the course of their working life.  But changing careers is very different from changing jobs and there are no government statistics available, as far as I'm aware, that shed light on how frequently Americans change careers as opposed to jobs.  Some experts ...