Designing the Author Platform
A step by step guide to marketing reputation and content.
My first serious conversation with an agent began, “I’ll be proud to represent this book. You have a platform.”
Her idea of a platform was credibility through credentials and professional reputation. If you don’t have that, get some. It does go a long way.
An author’s platform is all about the marketing, however. It is a matter of design to create public recognition of you and your work.
An author’s platform is an interactive design problem and not a disparate set of venues and credentials
Reasons for building a platform are commonplace fare on Medium. Using social media design principles to do so are not on the menu yet.
So here we are. I provide a step by step guide and I promise, you do not need to be a social media pro. The effort is worthwhile. The platform trumps content in the trad publishing world and is an absolute necessity for self-publishers.
Platform design is in the form of a wheel with spokes. The philosophy is social engineering applied to the marketing of author reputation and content.
The website
The website is the center of the wheel.
Stephen King is quoted heavily on Medium for his writing advice, but his work inspires articles on marketing. Check out his website. It is the best that money and existing content can buy. You can profit from examples such as his slideshows, which are easily replicated. More simple and perhaps closer to your personal experience might be Helen Scheurer’s site.
You need a URL. This part is easy. Go to namecheap.com or a dozen others to buy one. They cost a whole ten dollars.
The domain name must be FirstnameLastname.com. Any SEO research tells you to use .com over seemingly sexier alternatives. All author sites need to be reached through the author’s name.
Your name is your brand.
You also need a website design and you may never have had the pleasure and pain of setting one up. Squarespace and Wix cost little, are easy to use, and have a variety of customizable templates.
Now comes the fun part. You have lots of choices and a chance to show your artistic chops. You’re a writer; you should have some. Now you are a marketer and you must have some.
First choose your pages which have tabs for navigation. Simplicity is the soul of marketing on the web. People turn off in the face of navigation difficulties in the same way as they abandon an article with a lousy first paragraph.
A Home page and an About page are mandatory. If you’ve got those credentials, get them all into About. This is no time to be shy.
Your stories appear in a Stories tab. Pretty creative, huh? Sometimes marketing means being repetitively obvious. Follow Medium guidelines and provide a thumbnail picture along with the title. You can link directly to a publication outlet or store files courtesy of your website design subscription.
Blogging fits into the Stories category. Call it a blog if you must. Many people do. I just have a horror of portmanteau words.
A writer of books has a Books page. Create one even if you are starting your first book. This is the time to look at Stephen King again for inspiration. Provide short descriptions and link to pdfs with excerpts.
Make a video page. Video is big these days and publishers like to see what a potential author looks like as a speaker. A homemade video in which you talk about your work is fine. A film of a presentation in front of a group is better.
Keep it PG. Agents and publishers are watching. Sex may sell but this is not an album cover.
Some of us have a speciality too technical for something like Medium. Market the experience as part of credentials even though no one outside a narrow field would really read it. Make it a page. Give the reader some color about the field. Post old professional articles.
Agents and publishers love credentials.
Finally, a page is devoted to your pet if you have one. I’ll make the reason obvious when I come to Instagram.
Trust me, your pet is going to contribute to the design, interactivity and marketing of the platform.
The next step is Facebook. I know that Facebook is supposed to be for old folks, but c’mon, it has over 2.5 billion active users. If you don’t have a personal page, do that first. Get some friends.
Establish an author’s page.
Naming this page is an exception to my rule about branding. The page should be labeled with something referring to your work. If you are writing your first book, the title will do. It’s a sexy title, right? If you are writing several pieces way to developing a character, use the character. You get the idea.
One of the benefits of Facebook owning Instagram is the direct link between the two. They communicate without needing your constant attention. If you have the bucks and desire, advertising is available.
Instagram is for pictures and you’re a writer. No problem. There are over 3.7 million posts at #authorsofinstagram. It may look overwhelming but we need something specific.
Ever heard of text art? You’re about to become an artist.
Many examples of text art on Instagram are images with famous people’s quotes set on a bland background. I have no idea why this sells.
You are marketing original content and should make this clear in your profile.
The exercise is easier for nonfiction authors than for those who tell tales. Nonfiction writers have punchlines which make for quotes short enough to fit on a picture. Fiction authors must find brief catchy excerpts to illustrate.
As on Medium, stock photography works here. Otherwise, keep that content original. You are building a brand.
Tag until you are tired of typing or Instagram stops you, whichever comes first. Anything vaguely relevant to your content will do. There is a trick to this that makes the page’s optics look better. Put your tags in the first comment to any post. They will do their work without being pushed in people’s faces.
Marketing on Instagram is all about tagging followed by interaction
Take advantage of the ‘Stories’ feature. Stories last for twenty-four hours. They show up automatically on Facebook. Repurpose your content here. Take story titles from your website page. Every few days, cycle in a new one. Odds are good that you are producing new story content, but recycling is recommended anyway. New followers haven’t seen the old stuff.
You don’t need extra links to exploit this feature. You just need to learn a new term.
Link to bio.
Your Instagram profile should include a link to the stories page on your website. Link to bio is lingua franca on Instagram. Everyone knows what they’re looking for. One click gets them there.
Link to bio is a repetitive focus on the writing. Cognitive science suggests that successful marketing and repetition are closely correlated.
Repetition matters
Follow a few people and media outlets for the opportunity to comment on their page. The comments go out to a wider audience and create waves of recognition. Just a tip.
Dogtrine
A famous mathematician once said to look at a related problem to solve a difficult one. Successfully design of an author platform is not an easy problem.
Social engineering requires stimulus. If you want eyeballs, look at your pet.
Pet pages grow followers twice as fast as business pages. Dogs are twenty-two percent of the household population. Lots of readers have dogs and memes involving cat photos command large followings.
Create a conceptual link between pet and authorship
My book has Doctrine in the title. My dog’s page is Dogtrine. The website also has a tab labeled Dogtrine. Cut me some slack; we’re all creatives here.
The pet page links back to your author page. Your pet page can ‘like’ your author page, which further drives traffic.
Pets sell and so should your work.
I once designed a business website called The Analytics Incubator. Any content site has a community page. The hope was the common experience across the site’s apps would generate interaction in the form of posts, questions, and the like. This interaction would create community.
I forgot something. Social engineering requires direct stimulus, and the community initiative failed.
The page was linked to a Twitter feed with a sexy moniker. My team disseminated news such as unusual market conditions and the direction of global market openings. We advertised new research and apps on Twitter.
Subscription to the site doubled overnight.
There are ways and means to transmit information automatically to Twitter from your site, but the exercise requires some custom work. Do it by hand if you have to.
Social engineering requires direct stimulus
The wheel
I promised a design in the form of wheel with spokes. I have half a wheel for you and will describe the spokes as links.
The web site sits at the center of the wheel. Your best link for social media sites on the rim is FirstnameLastname/Stories. Save the grazer a click and go directly to content.
The exception is the link connecting the page to your Instagram pet account. Use FirstnameLastname/Pet for that one. Potential readers will explore the rest. No cats were killed in this post through curiosity. Satisfaction brought them back.
The pet account talks to the Instagram author page via the latter’s profile information containing the web site link.
Link to bio should be a programmed laptop key
Instagram text art easily can be programmed to automatically feed a slideshow on the website. The pet account feeds the website Pet page in the same fashion. Your author account supplies the content to the Home page.
Stories on Instagram will show up automatically as a story on Facebook. You don’t need to do a thing.
Facebook also will take your Instagram posts automatically. This functionality ensures content for the author page without labor.
Create followers for your Facebook author page starting with personal friends. Just ask them to ‘like’ you on the page.
Feed Twitter from Facebook, Instagram, and the web site. I have two cautions here.
Twitter interaction can rob precious time from the business of writing. Making the platform into a chatroom is a personal choice.
Second, by now all these sites are talking to each other and you must curate to avoid duplication.
The other half of the wheel
I did promise a whole wheel. The second half is on you and depends on what kind of publishing life you live.
Articles published in online media such as Medium are grist for the mill. Each site is on the wheel’s rim and connects to the web site. They probably don’t connect with each other, however.
LinkedIn also has a place on the rim if you are a user. The connection is one-way, from your web site’s Stories tab to the business social site. LinkedIn doesn’t have much outbound connectivity.
Amazon is another example. Use it for self-published manuscripts and if blessed, for your book that finally came out. Link to Amazon from title links on your author site. You can connect to LinkedIn manually, of course.
Taking it all away
An author’s platform is a social engineering exercise and not a disparate set of venues and credentials.
Construct and market it as though you aspire to be an influencer. That’s what you want to be anyway, right? The only difference is that your goal is the selling of content not third-party advertising.
The amount of self-promotion involved is daunting for sensitive souls. I had to swallow hard. You should too.
Just remember, for more information, link to bio. Link omitted. The lesson? Explicit advertising is prohibited on Medium. Social engineering replaces the need for adverts on your sites as well.
And good luck on your marketing journey. The platform is part of the path.
