If you’re just hearing the term, an author platform is your visibility as an author. It’s basically a combination of your social media accounts, google search results, blog, anything that ties you to your writing. Having an author platform is what gives you the ability to sell your books and increase your reach.
So, what do you need to do to create an author platform?
1. Create Social Media Accounts
If you already have social media accounts, great! Make sure they list that you’re an author (Or aspiring depending on where you are in your publishing journey), and it might be smart to delete any content that is unprofessional. Unless unprofessional is part of your niche.
That line gets a little hazy.
2. Set Up Your Accounts as Business Accounts
Pages on Facebook and Instagram can be linked and set up as a business account. As can Pinterest. Linking all three together allows people to find you easily no matter where they’ve started. And having them set up as a business account gives you the ability to check the status of your posts.
This is incredibly handy if you run a blog in connection to Pinterest.
3. Make Sure You are Posting to Reach Your Target Audience
If you are an author that writes YA Fantasy, posting about politics constantly probably won’t attract many readers. And if you write historical fiction, posting about Marvel all the time probably isn’t too great either.
A simple way to work out content is to key readers into your daily writing life. Give snippets about your work in progress. Post pictures of your work station. If you have an interesting day job, post about that.
I tend to post a mixture of things in relation to my YouTube content and my writing life.
4. Connect With Other Authors in Your Genre
Fellow authors are not your enemy. Quite the contrary. The only enemy as an author is yourself. People can always buy more than one book. I’ve been known to read up to six books a month, so building friendships can always help with sales as well as developing a better writing ethic.
We have so much to learn from the people around us, and following other authors who are in a place you want to be is one of the best ways to learn more about your genre.
5. Don’t Overwhelm Yourself
You don’t have to open twelve new accounts and post great content to them a thousand times a day every day. That’s totally unrealistic and won’t get the results you’re hoping for.
Work on growing one account at a time, posting once or twice each day, following people you’re actually interested in seeing content from. Quality is always better than quantity, especially when it comes to followers.
6. Make sure you have a professional website
Hey, look at that. You’re reading this on my website. Cool, right?
Having a website where you blog, show off your books, talk about yourself, get people to sign up for your newsletter, it’s all a great way to connect with readers. It gives them sort of a landing pad for where to find your books and other social media, and it gives them a place to come back to later on.
7. Connect with book bloggers, booktubers, and other book related peers
This one is pretty self explanatory. You need to connect with these people so they can tell other people about your books. But, a lot of these people have guidelines, so make sure you’re respectful of those and of their time.
8. Run giveaways and donate books
You are not going to make money doing this, but it will get your book into the hands of those who might have never found it otherwise, and I’d say that’s worth it.
9. Make friends not customers
If the people you connect with via social media are your friends, internet family, and associates rather than potential customers, you become invested in them just as much as you hope they are invested in you.
People will notice when you care what’s going on in their lives just as much as you care about promoting your books.
It doesn’t matter if you have 10,000 followers if none of them are interested in buying your work. But, if you have 300 followers who are all interested, you’ve made great strides.
I hope this helps you with your platform.
Good luck!
xoxo,
Ellie,