Business
The author before and after learning how to use a semicolon
I get approached from time to time by aspiring new writers, asking for advice on how to get started. The longer I’ve been doing this, the harder it gets to answer them. At this point I’ve been in the game nearly 20 years, so how do I condense what I’ve learned into a quick conversation or a brief email? And what if they are interested in a completely different type of writing than the kind that has made me as rich and famous as I currently am? (Hmmm – now that I think about it, that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. But I digress…)
So how to advise them? Do I lecture them on the ever-changing industry? Warn them of the dangers of reading the works of Clive Cussler? Or simply hand them a dog-eared copy of The Elements of Style and turn around and run? Depending on who asks, it’s hard to determine which advice would be the most useful.
When in doubt, fire up the time machine!
I’ve been binge-watching the old Stargate SG-1 TV series recently, and several of the stories focus on time travel, a concept that has always fascinated me. In a couple of episodes, the main characters manage to pass messages to versions of themselves who are living in a different time.
This got me to thinking: what kind of messages would Current-Day Keith send to Past Keith?
After considering obvious nuggets like “buy stock in Amazon” and “don’t enroll in Trump University,” I started thinking about what I would tell Keith The Writer From The Past (or, KTWFTP). Since SG-1 episodes usually incorporate a ticking clock or some other increasingly urgent complications, I decided to ramp up the pressure, and limit myself to five pieces of advice. Here’s what I came up with to share with the younger (and yes, hairier) Keith.
1. Know your genre – and its conventions.
Probably the biggest – and hardest – lesson I’ve learned as a writer is that genre matters. Historically the genre of a book just wasn’t something I thought or cared about – as a reader or as a writer. But after writing one hard-to-categorize manuscript after another, the first message I would pass on to KTWFTP is to pick a damn genre already. It will make things SO much simpler.
Why? Genre simplifies things by setting expectations. It helps an agent sell your book. It helps a publisher market your book. It helps a reader choose your book.
And if you’re self-publishing, it helps YOU market your book, which is utterly crucial. In an era when anybody can publish anything, you need a way to make your book stand out to your potential readers.
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Adrian Anghel, Flickr Creative Commons
I recently read a quote on writing I absolutely loved. It’s from Joe Beernink, who said, “Don’t write to become famous or to make a lot of money. Write because you love it. Write because not writing for more than a few days feels like you have abandoned a puppy in a mineshaft. Save the puppy.” The words resonated with me so much, because that’s exactly how I feel. I don’t take days off from writing. Ever. Others may feel boxed-in by strict self-imposed word count goals, but I love them. Having a set word count for the day inspires me, makes me stretch and push past my own equally self-imposed limitations and is my #1 antidote to feeling creative block. I write at least 1,000 words a day, 7 days a week, every single week, every single year, basically no matter what. And to be clear, I’m certainly not suggesting that anyone who doesn’t is less of a writer or less dedicated to their craft. That’s just my own process, what works for me.
I write in good times and bad times. For years, now, I’ve written 1,000 words a day through sickness and new babies and logistical life craziness and tragedy and grief. Even at the lowest, darkest moments, I’ve written because quite simply, however hard life feels in that moment, however hard it is to pick myself up and sit down at the keyboard, not writing would be harder still. And there’s obviously a practical benefit to keeping to a hard and fast writing schedule. Since this time last year, I’ve published 5 books I love and am so happy and grateful to have released into the world.
And yet. There’s always that little, and yet, isn’t there? Because there’s also, in our culture, the very prevalent worship of the “hustle.” We wear busy-ness as a badge of honor, take a certain strange pride in the length of our to-do lists, and convince ourselves that if we just hustle hard enough, we’ll somehow unlock the magical keys to success, riches, rainbows and happiness or whatever our goals might be. Now, of course I believe in the power of hard work and discipline. But the answer isn’t quite as simple as that.
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Image – iStockphoto: Katharina 13
Writers, among some of the most solitary workers in the world, can find growing support and services in a newly redirected Authors Guild that favors the majority, not the few.
Writing Alone, Working Together
To quote the immortal Alistair Cooke on Masterpiece Theatre, “Last time, as you’ll remember …” I was going on here about author advocacy. In the comments that followed, I discovered that everyone isn’t up to date on the Authors Guild, which is the States’ leading author advocacy organization, in business since 1912.
In the month since my last column here, in fact, the guild has made a series of moves that help define its developing role in the writer community and so this is a good time to back up and do a bit of groundwork on what the guild is, how it has changed since the start of 2015, and why authors may want to consider joining the 10,000 or so members already in place.
I’ll bullet out some talking points:
While you can see the organization’s member benefits laid out for yourself, here, I’ve chosen these recent points because they give you a look at the guild’s quickly developing proactive stance in six important areas:
As a point of disclosure, I’m not a member of the guild because I report on the guild’s work frequently as a journalist and have followed and commented on its changes and development since 2014. And my message today is more recommendation than provocation. If you don’t know the Authors Guild and its work–or if you have ideas about it that you haven’t revisited in some time–this is […]
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan
Put your very best writing on the first page of your manuscript, I was once told, and the rest will rise to the challenge. This is a good thing, because your very best writing belongs on every other page, as well.
In fact, today I want to convince you why your very best writing belongs everywhere.
Synopsis
Most writers consider it a necessary evil, so why spend more time on it than you have to? Here’s why: if you treat it as a precious piece of storytelling, you might sell your book. Or a movie option. Infuse your synopsis with voice and drama and character. Make the reader feel something. Such synopses are out there, writers, and yours may be competing with them.
Website
Think of visitors to your site as browsers in your personal store. You wouldn’t want to leave punctuation and spelling errors lying around for them to stumble over, would you? Your customers are already hindered by having no beautifully designed book to pick up and flip through. Make your graphics and digital copy pop off the page to shake your reader’s hand in a way that says, “I am a competent, confident writer that you can trust for your entertainment needs.”
Blog posts
Blog posts have come a long way since those first steam-of-consciousness missives by “iamawriter” in the 1990s, when capitalization and correct spelling were optional. These days it couldn’t be more different. In 2014, while promoting my first novel, I was surprised at the hoops my publicist sent me through just to come up with original content for book bloggers. She vetted all posts and sent them back with comments like “you can write a stronger opening.” And I could.
This was my first stab at an opening for As I Turn the Pages in answer to the question, “How has dance impacted your life?”
I was an active child with an unquenchable thirst for rhythmic physical endeavor. When my nose wasn’t in a novel I was playing hopscotch and jump rope, skiing (snow and water), diving, taking gymnastics, and cheerleading. But nothing set me aflame like the dance class I discovered when I was sixteen.
Second try:
I leapt into the world feet first and ready for action. When my nose wasn’t in a novel I was skipping across chalked patterns, diving from springboards, slicing hills with my skis, flipping over high jumps—then trying to do any or all of it on the balance beam. But nothing set me aflame like the dance class I discovered when I was sixteen.
Pro tip: Even if the point of your post is to interview another author, fashioning your questions so they elicit a story arc represents your own abilities as a novelist better than five random questions.
Social media comments
You may not realize the impact you make with the comments you leave on other people’s social media posts.
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Flickr Creative Commons: Theophilos Papadopoulos
Kim here to welcome Dee Willson to Writer Unboxed today! Dee is the award-winning author of A Keeper’s Truth, GOT (Gift of Travel), and No Apology For Being(WIP). You can learn more about Dee on her website, Facebook and Twitter.
So, I find myself blocked by a mountain. Okay, maybe blocked is a strong word. I am facing a mountain. A big, unmovable mountain. This mountain is publishing in a very specific sense. It is the great divide between two major categories created by the publishing world only forty (or so) years ago, but holding strong, despite confusion and change. The divide between YA and ADULT.
Before I go any further, maybe I should be clear: genre and target market are two different things. First Books (FB, Birth-School), Middle Grade (MG, -12), Young Adult (YA, 13-18), Adult (ADULT, 18+)…these are demographics, audiences, ages used by sales, merchandising, and marketing people. Horror, romance, sci-fi, fantasy…these are genres. Stephen King straddles several genres, but mostly writes for an adult audience. Harry Potter, even the last of the series, targets the YA reader, kids under 18. Harry Potter falls under the fantasy genre. Some books blur genre lines, some appeal to more than one audience. I was excited when NEW ADULT hit the scene. But NA got twisted into a genre when it should have been a target market. Two very different things.
Gosh, Dee, get back to the mountain….
Recently, two contradictory things happened in the same moment.
I opened an email from my agent – feedback from the big boys of publishing regarding my latest manuscript. “Love it, but is the author willing to make the protagonist eighteen or under, make the book YA?” My first thoughts were wow, how the hell do I alter an entire manuscript to appeal to a different target market? Can I? Should I? Why? I don’t consider myself a YA author.
While reading this email, I was opening a package, a copy of The Chicago Manual of Style, Seventeenth Edition, ‘The Essential Guide for Writers, Editors, and Publishers’. For those unaware, this is an industry bible. The book mostly covers non-fiction and editorial tips, but what really struck me was that it’s in its seventeenth edition. As in: changed, updated…seventeen times since its original incarnation. I thought, here is this tome, this style manual, rewritten to include up-to-date details, keeping up with the times. It moves, turns like a spoke in some massive publishing wheel.
Would changing my manuscript to YA be a positive change, a nod to society, a give required by the 21st century? Would it tell my character’s story best? Would it sell more books? Would it make me, the author, flexible, a spoke? Or would it be surrender, giving in to a publishing push, intimidated by the mountain?
You might be wondering how I got to this thought process. So let’s take a step back.
I write characters in their early twenties, present day. First person, if it helps to know. It’s a difficult age to write, to voice. So much is happening at this age. And so much is not happening at this age. […]
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image by Guillaume Joly
Writers get tired.
The process of writing, of editing, of writing some more, of editing some more, of searching for representation, of reworking the book yet again, of waiting so long to see your words in print that you forget you even wrote some of them, of publishing in its maddening and bountiful entirety… well, some days, it can feel like too much.
Every stage has its own ups and downs, but personally, I find the promotion stage both the most exciting and the most challenging. Many parts of the publishing process can feel out of your control. Partly that’s because they are. But promotion is different because, unlike other stages, it has the capacity to go on forever. The joy and terror of publishing in the social media age is that once you have a book, you literally could be promoting it every minute of every day.
(Note to writers everywhere: do NOT promote your book every minute of every day.)
Right now, my latest book (published under a pseudonym, as regular readers know) has been out in paperback for a few months. Typically, this is when a publisher’s efforts to promote the book taper off and any further promotion is squarely in my hands. Since my next book isn’t out for almost a year, it’s a little early to start pushing that one, so it would make perfect sense for me to push a little harder on promotion of the paperback one.
And yet I spend day after day not doing it. Why? Because, as I mentioned above: tired.
But I’ve been here before, and I always find a way out. I will this time too. In case you find yourself in the same situation, here are my three rules for getting out of a why-do-I-bother, so-tired-of-promoting-this-book funk:
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Photo by Diego PH on Unsplash
I have to confess I’ve never been a huge fan of public speaking. And yet, since Everyone Knows You Go Home came out in March, I’ve been on a whirlwind of a book tour that’s consisted of day after day of public speaking.
And I’ve loved every minute of it.
Despite being an introvert and a person who grew up very shy and soft spoken, reading my work in front of audiences has been a transformative experience. Whereas for my first book, I would get nearly unbearably nervous before an event, for my second I’ve learned to embrace the nerves as productive energy. It reminds me a lot of my teens and early twenties, a time when I was a dancer and performed onstage regularly. Always, before curtain, I’d become overwhelmed by a rush of nerves that immediately went away when the music started. There was no going back at that point, so I’d have no choice but to surrender to the moment. Those three to five minutes of dancing were always pure bliss, liberating in ways that are hard to describe.
Reading my work has begun to feel like that as well, but only because I don’t think of it as reading or public speaking. I think of it as a performance. Framed in this way, it’s something I realize I’m lucky to be able to do. Here is an audience—real, live people!—wanting to experience my work.
As a show of gratitude, I try to make that experience as enjoyable as possible. Below are some ways performing affects how I prepare for an event—and how it might help you, too.
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‘The Spirit of the Printed Word’ is one of Arthur Crisp’s murals in the reading room of Canada’s Parliament Building. Image: Parliament of Canada, House of Commons
Torching for It
Murals are among some of the West’s most interesting public art.
This one is The Spirit of the Printed Word by Arthur Crisp, 1921. It’s in the reading room at the Canadian House of Commons. I came across it during our coverage at Publishing Perspectives of the Canadian Parliament’s hearings on the 2012 Copyright Modernization Act–which has led to terrible losses (some $50 million annually) for authors and their publishers.
Crisp’s Spirit shows us the allegorical figure lifting high her “torch of knowledge” and her mirror, which the curators’ commentary tells us “reflects the news of the world.”
No fool she, Spirit has engaged, as you can see, two small boys to do all the work. I readily join her in commending this labor approach to you. The guys appear to be slogging through the business of lugging stacks of paper and handling typesetting. These kids need Kindles.
There’s a deco-sleek pigeon gliding by near Spirit’s torch on the right, a bird said to represent the transmission of information. On the left, there’s a more fluttery dove, symbolizing good tidings.
Notice that a mural is work of aesthetic advocacy. And in his testimony to the Canadian parliament committee, John Degen, who heads the Writers’ Union, said that some Canadian authors have stopped writing because the copyright exceptions assigned to education have simply gutted their copyright-revenue earnings.
That’s a case in which trade- and textbook authors are watching their publishers get nothing for the use of their titles in close to 100 school districts and ministerial areas of Canada. It’s an obvious moment in which author advocacy is critical. Degen is up to the mark, too.
“Fully 80 percent of our licensing income has simply disappeared,” Degen told the legislators, “because schools now copy for free what they used to pay for. Each year in Canada more than 600 million pages of published work are copied for use in educational course packs, both print and digital, and the education sector is essentially claiming all of that work for free. The world’s authors are also watching this process with great interest and considerable anxiety.”
If anything, what the Canadian copyright crisis reminds us is how loosely an author corps is formed in a national setting, and how vulnerable it can be to unthinkable policy blunders like the Copyright Modernization Act of 2012.
And that gets us to our provocation today.
Who’s on Your Advocacy Mural?
Provocations graphic by Liam Walsh
In terms of industry players on the policy level, authors are the ones from whom we hear the least frequently. Publishers are better organized and in Canada were integral to the development of the copyright revenue agency that’s now under attack in that country. The publishers association’s folks speak eloquently to the issue, they’re terrific advocates, actually, for themselves and their authors.
But one of the defining factors in any picture of the publishing business has been that it’s an industry based on the voluntary submission of its fundamental product, the content, by people it does not know (until […]
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I like to think I’m a man of conviction. The kind of man who acts swiftly to right a wrong, who won’t tolerate an injustice, nor support or enable morally questionable behavior. For example, a couple of weeks ago a friend of mine alerted me that somebody had posted a racist sentiment on my Facebook wall. My justice was swift and decisive: I deleted the post and unfriended the person who posted it, despite the fact that we were former coworkers who had been friends for 20 years. My buddy who had alerted me was surprised by the speed and severity of my response. “Damn,” he observed, “KC doesn’t mess around.” I’ll admit, seeing his reaction made me feel kind of good – and maybe a little smug. Nope, I thought, KC does NOT mess around.
But here’s the thing.
Actually, the first sentence in my opening paragraph was carefully worded. And the key phrase in it is “like to think.” Because as much as I may want to pat myself on the back, the truth is that quashing a racist sentiment on social media is not a very hard thing to justify, nor is it particularly praiseworthy. I suspect most decent people wouldn’t tolerate racist language on their Facebook walls. But what about something a little less directly impactful?
I mean, this was a racist statement, and it was posted on MY wall. Clearly that was not to be tolerated. But what do I do when I find out – after the fact – that the person who wrote a song I like is a racist? Or that an actor I admire has a history of spousal abuse? Or that a novelist I enjoy actually murdered somebody? Where do I draw the line?
It’s a question that’s coming up more and more these days. In the past year, we’ve begun to see a flood of bad behavior by popular artists – particularly male artists – being exposed. The #MeToo movement is shedding some much-needed light on a long history of indefensibly bad behavior by powerful males in the arts, who have been using sex, gender and power to dominate and/or manipulate – and in some cases, flat-out ruin – careers and lives.
One by one we’re seeing artistic icons being toppled. Louis CK. Bill Cosby. Harvey Turdstein (okay, I might have gotten the spelling wrong on that one). Many of us are relishing the experience of witnessing this sea change. It’s high time, we think, as we watch Roman Polanksi ousted from the Oscars academy. Good riddance, we think, as Kevin Spacey is dropped from his TV series. Yes, it feels kind of good, a rare glimpse of karma in action.
But it also leaves each of us with a challenge. Specifically, once we’ve identified an artist as being a not-so-good person, what do we do about that artist’s body of work?
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I’ve been writing professionally – as in, getting paid for my writing – since signing my first contract in 1999. In that time, I’ve written both indie and for traditional publishing houses.
Something I don’t often share: I have also ghostwritten a few books and projects. I don’t publicize it because that’s the nature of the beast. The idea behind ghostwriting is being a ghost, vanishing into the work.
When I talk to writers about ghostwriting, I tend to get two reactions.
The first is a veiled contempt at the concept of not writing one’s own book. They’re not contemptuous of me, necessarily. They just don’t like the whole concept of someone handing off an idea and then taking credit for someone else’s labor. (Of course, not all ghostwriting is like this — there are co-writers, etc. — but this is the thought that often comes up.)
The second reaction is a not-so-veiled eagerness. These are often writers who are eager to quit their soul-sucking day jobs, and who see ghostwriting as a foot in the door, a chance to do what they love (writing) while getting paid. They often ask me how to get ghostwriting jobs.
There are a lot of pros and cons to ghostwriting. It’s like working in food service, in my opinion: it’s a good thing for everyone to try, because you’ll never look at the process the same way again. (You’ll also tip better because you know just how hard the work is. <g>)
If you’re on the fence about pursuing ghostwriting, here are some of my experiences to help you decide.
The Pros
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Deep down, I wanted to label it Climate Fiction, but I wasn’t sure my book fit the criteria. Although I’d read a lot of climate-themed literature, I didn’t quite understand the scope of the genre. Is it even a real genre? Is a microgenre? I had some homework to do.
The term Cli-Fi was coined in 2007 by journalist Dan Bloom. Since then, it has been simmering quietly, but never making enough noise to become its own stand-alone genre in bookstores or on Amazon (although it has garnered buzz in publications such as Scientific American, Chicago Review of Books, The New York Times, and The Guardian.) Like all good books, Climate Fiction novels must tell a compelling story, but beyond the story, they must stir an awareness, an awakening in the reader. Cli-Fi must be based on real science and should further the conversation about our changing environment. It should challenge us to see—or imagine—things differently and reconsider what we accept as normal.
Recently, I’ve seen a flurry of new Cli-Fi novels coming to market, many by debut authors. In the wake of hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, the on-going US wildfires, and battles over Indigenous water rights, I suspect there are many more in the works.
In my own novel, Four Degrees, everything that happens is a direct result of the four-degree uptick in the temperature in a small New England town. Every plot point directly or indirectly links back to climate. But my book is not about climate change. Plot wise, it is a contemporary story about a 30-year-old murder cover up that resurfaces and derails an entomologist, just as she is about to prove invasive beetles are triggering forest fires during a drought.
I hesitate to label it Climate Fiction (even though I really want to) because I think the moniker conjures up images of apocalyptic stories of rising seas levels and devastating weather events. Most Climate Fiction novels are dystopian or science fiction. My book is neither of those things, and I worry that slapping a Cli-Fi label on it would mislead readers.
Within Climate Fiction, there exists a subset of contemporary, realistic novels. They are not sci-fi, futuristic, or dystopian, but recognizable stories relating climate change as it is already happening.
Maybe this is where my novel belongs.
Barbara Kingsolver’s Fight Behavior is often pointed to as an example of contemporary Climate Fiction. Kingsolver doesn’t get preachy. Her characters are not ecowarriors. She presents a rural Appalachian community with an unexpected event linked to climate change. She allows the characters respond in authentic ways. She doesn’t grab readers by the lapels and shout a climate warning. She doesn’t need to.
Another contemporary example is Ashley Shelby’s South Pole Station about an artist doing a residency in Antarctica. Among the humorous cast of characters is a climate denier. Instead of depicting the climate denier as stupid or uneducated, Shelby treats him with dignity, which makes the story even more compelling. Her treatment of climate deniers as fully rounded characters makes the need to sound the climate alarm even more urgent.
Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, which won the 2011 National Book Award, and Robin MacArthur’s 2018 debut Heart Spring Mountain are examples of literary fiction that could also be considered contemporary Climate Fiction. Salvage the […]
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Image – iStockphoto: Kristina Jovanovic
Hemming in the Tension
When I tweeted up the author Anne R. Allen for writing that “Word count guidelines have been trending down in the last decade,” I found our colleague Hugh Howey checking in from a galaxy far, far away to say, “Slaughterhouse Five, Frankenstein, and Fahrenheit 451 are three of my favorite sci-fi works of all-time, and each is around 50K. The problem part of most novels is the boring middle bit. Best to just leave that part out.”
The desired price of the hardback began to determine the length of the manuscript, which is a weird way to do art. Personally, I'd read more fantasy novels if they came in smaller size but more often. Waiting 7 years for a 1,500 page tome is no bueno.
— Hugh Howey (@hughhowey) March 21, 2018
He’s right, of course, as is Anne Allen, and we went on to discuss (briefly!) the problem some big-name authors run into in this regard, too. I call it the Clancy effect. Once they’re established as a publishing house’s majors, the editorial touch gets lighter, often more pixie dust than anything else. Typos are caught, we have to hope, but developmental work (“structural” edits to your British neighbors) goes out the window.
That can go to anybody’s head, and many of us can name an icon whose work got leggier and sadly shapeless as the big career flabbed on.
I've seen this personally when I edit anthologies. The bigger the name, the more umbrage the author takes with any suggestion. I think writing can get worse over a career because of the unwillingness to be edited (and laziness from the publisher).
— Hugh Howey (@hughhowey) March 21, 2018
Too Much Entertainment
Provocations graphic by Liam Walsh
At London Book Fair last week, another element of this issue came into sharper focus as I moderated a panel for the Byte the Book organization, which looks at the industry from the digital vantage point.
While the session was titled “Publishers Go Prospecting: Finding Hidden Treasure in Your Content,” I’d worked out with our four fine panelists (from the BBC, Penguin Random House, Vodafone, and Hodder Education) an approach that would take us past the obvious issues of spelunking for good backlist titles. (Bring Up the Bodies, as Hilary Mantel might say.)
We looked at today’s mushrooming level of competition for reading time from really fine television and film. After all, you may have felt the first really deep tremor of storytelling’s new cinematic leadership in February when Amazon Publishing created its Topple Books imprint in direct collaboration with Amazon Studios and the activist-filmmaker Jill Soloway (Transparent, I Love Dick, Six Feet Under).
Tom Goodwin
As the futurist and corporate strategist Tom Goodwin told me, “Book publishing is not in the ‘text industry.’ It’s not in the ‘reading industry.’ It’s in the ‘what do people want to spend their time doing? industry.’”
And that’s where the rubber is going to increasingly meet the shortest road possible.
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A few months ago, in response to a personal conundrum I shared with you, we debated the merits of wrestling a novel that wanted to be written in first-person into third, and whether that would be wise from a marketing perspective. Positions were expounded, personal research advanced, and a few minds possibly changed or stretched. Well, my friends, if you are an indie writer, or traditionally published but able to influence your book’s marketing campaign, the first-third debate doesn’t end there.
You have yet another decision to make.
To wit, have you noticed the accelerating trend toward first-person marketing copy? i.e. taglines or back cover copy written from within the point of view of one or more characters? (Click here for a peek at the current #6 book in the Kindle US store.)
At the time I was putting out Cold and Hottie, given its frequent use by some of contemporary romance’s bestselling authors, I certainly did. But would it be the right move?
To get a handle on best practices, I did an unofficial survey of followers on my Facebook page—presumably people open to my fiction—and asked them what they thought of first-person book blurbs. Before I summarize what they said, I should make it clear that my author page skews heavily toward other writers. Their collective wisdom, therefore, might not extend to readers in general or your genre’s readers in particular. As you might have noticed, a good number of us get hung up on rules that readers don’t see as necessary.
With that said, here are the results:
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Please welcome former WU contributor Jane Friedman back to WU today! Jane has 20 years of experience in the publishing industry, with expertise in business strategy for authors and publishers. She’s the co-founder (with WU’s Porter Anderson) of The Hot Sheet, the essential industry newsletter for authors, and has previously worked for F+W Media (home to Writer’s Digest) and the Virginia Quarterly Review.
Jane’s newest book is The Business of Being a Writer (University of Chicago Press); Publishers Weekly wrote that it is “destined to become a staple reference book for writers and those interested in publishing careers.”
In addition to being a professor with The Great Courses, Jane has delivered keynotes and workshops on the digital era of authorship at worldwide industry events, including the Writer’s Digest annual conference, San Miguel Writers Conference, The Muse & The Marketplace, Frankfurt Book Fair, BookExpo America, LitFlow Berlin, and Digital Book World. Find out more at janefriedman.com.
A Smarter Author Platform for the Digital Era of Publishing
Author platform, in its simplest form, is an author’s ability to sell books. What that platform looks like, or how it works, varies from author to author: Some are big names who can attract attention with any book they release, others have figured out how to harness a local or regional fan base to spread word of mouth, and still others know how to use digital media for visibility.
But by far, digital media—and social media specifically—is the most prevalent and straightforward way that authors are now visible to readers and sell books. In some ways, this has changed publishers’ expectations—and what authors need to do regardless of how they’re published—but in other ways, the game has remained exactly the same. It’s just that now there are more game expansion packs, more players to navigate, and more rules that tend to change in the middle of game play.
Stop Focusing on Social Media Numbers and Look at Your Lead Gen Strategy Instead
When social media was still relatively new, there was a lot of focus and attention on the numbers. How many followers do you have? How many likes? How many shares?
While numbers are still a surface-level indicator of your platform strength, it’s too easy to boost social media activity in an artificial way, leading to numbers that are fairly meaningless. (Even with my own 224,000 followers on Twitter, which is 100% organically grown, a good portion consists of fake accounts that contribute nothing to my platform.) This is why there’s been more attention and focus lately on email newsletters—which indicate more highly engaged readers or followers, not casual or fake ones—and authors collaborating to cater to rather specific audiences or markets, such as Tall Poppy Writers.
A strategic author should evaluate their platform strength on three levels:
Social media can be disappointing when it comes to uncovering new readers if you aren’t spending ad dollars, but it does a great job at engaging people who are already aware of you and your work. Discounts and freebies—regardless of where they’re offered—tend to be better tools for finding new fans. I often hear from authors […]
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