Top 5 Tips on Building Your Author Platform

As a debut author, I’ve been told that I NEED to establish an author platform now.

But what is an author platform? Well, it’s everything you’re doing online and offline to create awareness about YOU as an author. From the TikToks you’re sharing to the friendships you’ve made with local booksellers.

Anything you're doing to increase your visibility and make it easier for your target readers to discover and connect with you and your books is considered building your author platform.

So why is having an author platform so important? Because it’ll help you target and attract new readers on a regular basis. You’ll be able to engage those readers and, over time, convert them into raving fans that label you as an “auto-buy author” for them. And, most importantly, an author platform will help you build meaningful relationships so you can sell more books consistently.

TLDR; Your author platform will make it possible for you to build relationships with your readers, increase your readership, and boost your sales.

My Top 5 Tips on Building Your Author Platform

1. Define Your Brand

I think the easiest way to define your brand is to answer this question: What do you want to be known for?

Sweeping romances that hurt? Enemies to lovers with spice levels that sizzle? Happily ever afters guaranteed?

Whatever it is, you should know this pretty early on because this is what will help you stand out online.

Bonus List: 4 Simple Ways to Define Your Brand:

• Are you going to use your real name or your pen name? Pick one and use it consistently.
• Use one professional headshot that readers can instantly recognize.
• Remember those little sentence examples I gave you above? Come up with a one-sentence tagline that communicates what makes your books unique.
• Establish a brand palette that includes fonts and colors that fit with your desired aesthetic.

2. Get to Know Your Target Readers

One of the biggest parts of marketing is knowing WHO you are marketing to! Who is reading your books? Who do you want to read your books? A great way to get to the bottom of this is by knowing your target readers deeply.

Consider answering these questions to get to know your target readers:

• Who are they? And what do they do for a living?
• What’s their age, sex, marital status?
• What books do they like to read? What authors do they love?
• Where are they most likely to leave reviews?
• What tropes do they love? What tropes do they hate?
• Where do they spend their time online and offline?

3. Build and Nurture an Email List

Social media is fleeting in today’s age. You never know when one platform is going to vanish into oblivion for the next big thing… But you don’t have to have that fear with your email list!

While it may seem daunting, growing your email list the right way is one of the best things you can do! Simply choose an email service provider (e.g. MailChimp, ConvertKit, etc.) and add a sign-up form on your website. From there, you should create a reader magnet that incentivizes the reader to sign-up. It’s usually a digital download of some kind (think a novella, a collection of short stories, a bonus chapter from another character’s POV, etc.).

Once you’ve got everything set up and ready to go, decide how often you’re going to communicate to your list and nurture them with non-spammy emails. Remember: You don’t always have to sell!

4. Support Your Fellow Authors

I’m a firm believer of Community Over Competition! I will scream about my colleagues books from the rooftops. Because when you genuinely support each other, good things happen. And, from a marketing standpoint, you’re able to tap into other author’s communities and their readers without coming across as spammy. It's a win-win!

5. Take Advantage of Social Media

Social media can be exhausting. But it's a brilliant way to increase your brand visibility and get your books in front of a large number of people without even leaving the house. (As an introvert, it doesn’t get better than that!).

So how can you take advantage of social media? By creating a feasible marketing strategy that sees you using social media to your benefit, establishing time limits and capacities for content creation, and by hanging out on the platforms that YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE USES.

Think back to tip number two where I mentioned getting to know your target audience. Where do they hang out online? On Instagram? TikTok? What hashtags are they using? (Psst. A great way to reach new readers is through hashtags! Read all about them in this blog.)  

Wherever your audience is hanging out is where you should be.

Remember, building your author platform, growing your brand, and establishing a horde of ravenous readers does not happen overnight. So start now!

Lara Buckheit was born and raised on the Eastern Shore. Her debut novel A REALM OF ASH AND SHADOW releases in April 2023! She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Communications from Wilmington University, is a 2021 WriteMentor Mentee, an avid writer (and reader) of spice, and one time she met Taylor Swift’s dad. She started writing at a very young age, mostly fanfiction centered around women with swords and men with devilish grins. And she hasn’t stopped since. When not writing, Lara can be found drinking tea, hustling for her day job, reading from her endless TBR pile, or hanging out on her body confidence Instagram. Lara currently lives in Roanoke, VA, with her fiancé, dog, and thirteen house plants named after fictional characters. Connect with her here: https://bio.site/larabuckheit

The One Thing an Author Must Do to Expand their Platform

GREY MAGIC is out in audiobook! All three Bonds of Magic books are now live on Audible for your glomming pleasure!

  

This week at the SFF Seven, we're offering tips for expanding your author platform.

"Platform" is one of those words I'm not terribly fond of, seeing as how it comes from the world of sales and legal wrangling. If you do a bit of digging (but please don't go down that rabbit hole!) you'll find that the term arose in the early 90s, along with the advent and burgeoning of the internet, and originally applied to nonfiction works and proposals. (Jane Friedman has a great write-up on it here.) Nowadays it seems like the term gets thrown about by all sorts of agent, editor, and marketing types in seeking the ideal author for them to make money off of. 

(Note: there's nothing wrong with trad-publishing folks making money off of authors. That's the business model and it can work for everyone involved. I just feel that the 'must have a great platform' folks are more interested in the generating moolah side of things than, you know, books.)

Anyway, as Jane succinctly defines it, an author platform is an ability to sell books because of who you are or who you can reach.

So... not all of us, right? Most authors of fiction sell books because of our voice and the stories we write, not who we are. However! What we write is what reaches people, so who we can reach is within reasonable grasp for a writer of fiction. 

Are you ready for this? The great secret??

Write more books!

Or short stories. Or create games or draw comics. Whatever medium is floating your creative boat at the moment, do more of that!

I know, I know - the answer is always the same. But that's because this is the very best advice out there. The most effective marketing for any author is to create more. The more stuff you have out there, the more people you can reach. 

Seriously, over the years I've seen SO MANY AUTHORS get sucked into focusing on flogging a single work or series to the exclusion of all other efforts. Sure, it can be easy to get focused on wanting a particular work to succeed, and yes, marketing can feel like a clearer path, with lots of vultures vendors out there waiting to take your money with glowing promises of high sales. Writing more stuff is hard.

But creating stuff is why you got into the gig in the first place, yes? So go do it, my friend. 

How do I love fiction? Let me count the ways.

(sword on display at Château de Chambord)

There’s a ton of fictional aspects that don’t work in reality. But where’s the fun in that?! 

I appreciate the fictitious gems in books and on screen that make me suspend belief. I love when creatives take the mundane and fictionalize it. I’m a fictionist because I NEED fiction.

Why do I say I need fiction? Basically, to echo my post from last week, because fiction gives us hope that there’s more out there, that we’re part of something bigger than ourselves, that we’re capable of far more than we can imagine. And everyone needs hope. 

But back to our topic of the week which is: what’s your favorite bit of pop-culture fiction doesn’t work well in reality. Vivien Jackson beat me to this with her post yesterday (such a good top 10 list, go check it out!!), but here are a few of my favorite things that are better in fiction:

1. The ringing sword draw. You’ve heard it so many times you may believe it’s real. Though, in reality, a blade doesn’t shhhinnng when it slides free of its scabbard, unless you have one made out of metal and then you’ve got other issues. But a dramatic sword draw wouldn’t be…dramatic if there wasn’t a pure, metallic ring. Think Jon Snow drawing his sword against a mob of white walkers in Game of Thrones. 

2. When evil's defeated, their mountain/castle/spaceship blows up and becomes rubble. I really like this analogy to life as we’re constantly in a battle, internally or externally, for good to win out. It’s just not usually as epic as say Sauron’s eye exploding.

3. Implants. No. No, not those implants. The sci-fi implants that project a computer screen in front of the character’s face, the ones that open doors with the wave of a hand, the kind of implants that sometimes require the main character’s (MC) to eject a chip from within their body to provide evidence that will bring down the big baddies. You know…those implant

4. Capes. You know someone’s someone and that they mean business when they’re wearing a cape. And they always flow spectacularly in the wind, real or nonexistent. Think Tessa Thompson as Valkyrie in Thor Ragnarok.

5. The gadget save. Tweak as you see fit for sci-fi, mystery, thriller, horror, etc. But they’re all the same, the MC's in a fix and then their gadget-supplier shows up or sends them the perfect tool. Or, the MC’s smart enough to make the tool perfect…like in MacGyver and James Bond.

6. Televators. My then four year-old son said he wanted a televator: “You know, mom, one of those elevators that poofs you where you want to go.” My mind conjured a mix of Dr. Who’s TARDIS and Star Trek’s transporter, so number 5 is an homage to all of those futuristic re-locaters. 

7. The slow-mo first kiss. In my memory, my first kiss with my husband happened in slow motion as the crickets sang around us and the moonlight sparkled on the bench. And I love how fiction can recreate the lightening jolt of the perfect, first kiss and even amplifies it with rain/music/the impossibly suddenly empty room, etc. 

8. Damage Control. I love how the MC’s car can scrape the side fo a building, be shot up, make a jump over a parted lift-bridge, and still slide into a parking spot. Same for spaceships. The Millennium Falcon’s taken on more hits and lost more pieces than any car could ever dream! 

9. Dragons.

10. I have to do it…I just have to. I have to list running in high heels as number Ten. It’s incredibly difficult to pull off in real life, trust me, I’ve done it, and it’s dang near impossible to make it appear as if you’re sprinting in tennis shoes.

There you have it. Ten reasons I love fiction for its unrealisticness! What’s one of yours?

I'm Nuts Enough, I Do Not Need an Unreliable Narrator's Help

Yesterday was my father's birthday. January 31st. He wanted to have dinner at a tiki bar. So we found something that was on the water. As luck would have it, we were in perfect position for the sunset over Tampa Bay.

I imagine the person pointing is telling stories - fish stories, maybe. Or tales about what lies in the direction they're pointing. Which leads us to unreliable narrators. I had been going to say I don't know much about unreliable narrators, but in fact, I now more than I want. It's just not from fiction.

I think the important thing to keep in mind about unreliable narrators is that they are giving you the truth as they see it. It's a truth they utterly believe, that they are invested in. Chances are, that even if you catch them out in what you'd swear was a dead on lie, they'll deny it to their graves. I admit this is not my favorite story trope. Maybe in part because I am not entirely certain I could pull it off as a writer. Or maybe because I knew one. For real. And I tried to be her friend. It went well. For a little while.

Let's call her Joan. There's no way to put too fine a point on it. She lied. All the time. Funny thing, there was zero malice behind it. It was 100% telling you what you wanted to hear - things like, 'I'm coming to your house to pick up the Very Important Thing you wanted me to pick up!' Then I'd get a text - 'hey traffic is terrible.' Then another text. 'Accident on freeway.' That's about the point I worked out she wasn't on the road at all. Hadn't, in fact, even left her house. Called out on it, the next lie was that she was desperately ill and had to undergo radical treatment that oddly, never had any physical impact. The final straw came when she lied to someone else to the point of attempting to impersonate someone in authority in email.

We'd gone from saying what she believed her friends wanted to hear to actual criminal activity in that last case. And yet. When confronted, she denied that any of it was a lie. Honestly, looking back, I think she believed that no one would or could like her for her. They'd only like her for what they believed she could do for them. So she'd constructed fiction after fiction and then convinced herself they were fact. But that's me. Attempting to rationalize something that may not be at all rational.

So maybe you'll understand when I say I've sort of had my fill of unreliable narrators in real life.  I don't deal with Joan anymore, but there are a few other people with tenuous grips on consensual reality that I can't avoid. And can't safely describe here. It means that since I have to live unreliable narration, I really do not want it anywhere near my entertainment.

Real life doesn't have to make sense. It's a relief to me when my fiction does make at least a little bit of sense. Am I weird here? If you like an unreliable narrator in a book, do you have people in your life who actually DO that? I'm wondering if my distaste is colored by my exposure or if everyone has had similar experiences in life and me not liking an unreliable narrator in fiction is just me.