Developing Your Author Platform - What If You Could Not Fail

I have a tie my sister-in-law, Karen, made for me. It is black with a red dot. I have received somany comments about that tie that I treat it as my trademark tie, the one I wear when I want folks to remember me. ?It is part of my brand when I am someplace where I can meet new folks to do business with. I can hear them ask, ?Who is the fellow with the red dot on his tie.? It is easy to remember.

Being remembered is important when it comes to being a writer, too. A few weeks ago I did a series of blog posts about marketing yourself. This is important because if you are reading this blog you are either an unpublished writer, a newly published writer, or you are self-publishing. Marketing yourself and being remembered is important. Unless you are one of the top twenty writers in the country, the publishers are going to let you handle a lot of the marketing yourself (actually, they probably won?t market you and hope you figure out that you have to do it).

Just ask Kathleen Grissom, author of The Kitchen House, or read this blog post about her.

I was browsing through the internet today and came across this guest post on Live Write Thrive by Matthew Turner about selling your writing without selling your soul.

Turner advocates developing an author platform, whether you write fiction, non-fiction, poetry, plays?whatever. The platform is how people will remember you.

It is an important consideration. As an author you should treat yourself as a business. Look at your platform as your business plan, identifying who you are and what you do. You should address the kinds of novels or books you write, the common themes they deal with, and how that can translate into other business opportunities, whether it be public speaking or action figures based on one of your characters (I see that as a possibility for one of my characters). How do you publish?through traditional channels with an agent and a publisher, or do you self-publish? Do you mix it up? How does that work?

Do you have other distinctions in your brand? Do you write series books?? Dress a certain way (the tie with the red dot is mine)? Advocate certain topics and causes? These could all be part of your platform, who you are.

Or maybe you don?t want a distinctive platform. You want to write and publish. Perfectly legitimate. Just be mindful that it is your platform.

As you transition into your career as a writer, these are things you want to think about.

See ya? later

WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a?Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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Source: http://whatifyoucouldnotfail.typepad.com/blog/2012/10/developing-your-author-platform-2.html

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