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ОглавлениеIt Takes an Audience
Authors need readers, and to build audience, this is not the time to remain anonymous! This book solves challenges in growing readership in an era of change. Now even the way the written word reaches your audience is new.
This book teaches you how to build your author platform, also known as your public persona, to serve as a magnet for building up your audience. We show you the essential elements to build your platform into one that attracts media, loyal audience followers, and buyers of your book. Like every strong relationship, your readers need to feel they can trust you, that they can talk to you, that you are the authentic “real deal,” and that you have the expertise in the subject matter or entertainment they’re interested in. This isn’t about advertising or selling. It’s about informing, entertaining, and knowing that sales will follow.
Strong author platforms that combine these very elements usually accompany best-selling book titles. Exemplary platforms include the author sites of best-selling authors Malcolm Gladwell (author of Blink, Outliers, and The Tipping Point; gladwell.com) or Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner (freakonomics.com).
We know you’re busy! You’re following your mission and life’s work, and you want to work on your manuscript without being distracted by yet another job: marketing your book. But we also know that technology has changed something fundamental in the way we communicate. By holding this book in your hand, you already understand that it’s critical for you to learn to harness new enabling tools on the web and to build your public persona, too. The problem is carving out the time to explore how to do it and then taking the time to figure it out. That’s why we organized this book into self-contained, one-step-at-a-time chunks. Once through the process, you’ll see your own author platform materialize and bring in far more people than you can imagine.
We’re living in an increasingly enlightened and exciting time when people come together and collaborate, when we can even talk directly to the president of our country, to a CEO of a large company, to a thought leader who influenced us, or to a celebrity who used to be out of reach. For authors, that means people want to talk to you, too, to make comments and ask you questions. It means taking your audience into account in writing your manuscript, listening to and responding to comments, and adding your own spin far beyond what a publisher could possibly advertise for you. With digital tools on the web, you’re more empowered as an author to expand your influence and make connections all over our planet.
Advertising claims and push are slowly going by the wayside, being replaced with interactive dialogue. Now companies selling potato chips on television are asking their audience to vote online for their favorite flavor. News and entertainment shows like American Idol show hashtags on screen to bring audience into the show with Twitter comments on the screen. Live audience comments via Twitter can influence the outcome of a reality show (or shape the outcome of a presidential debate) and always add perspective.
This is the era of creating dialogue with an audience.
All authors, experienced and new, nonfiction and fiction, best and brightest and novice, need to know and harness the new rules explained here to create a platform. Here we motivate you to promote and then give you the blueprint and step-by-step how-to. It’s time to run with it! All too often authors run in the other direction from the very thought of promotion.
This Book Propels You Forward
You’re reading this book because you’ve taken precious time to seek out specialists with decades of expertise in the publishing and tech industries to translate, pre-digest, and give you strategies, models, and steps that fit your criteria: simple, quick, and clear.
You’re holding the 14-point author platform guide developed and used by successful authors, with interim steps, checklists, and a plan infused with the best of technology available to you. Here you’re given a choice to go quick and easy by using these standard models or to go a step beyond and customize to fit your purpose and unique author brand.
Authors who resist the shift from monologue to dialogue are falling behind; those who embrace this shift find that using the power of the crowd and the strength of the Internet engine propels them to their goals.
You’re holding the blueprint of your own author platform here, and in the summary at the back of this book are tearout sheets that form a complete platform publicity plan. We include some tutorial guides to keep everything under one roof for you and success stories and advice from our successful author clients. We’ve researched and made recommendations based on successful author platforms so that busy authors (you) can save money and a lot of time by avoiding the task of sifting through massive amounts of information. We’ve done that for you.
How you build your author platform, widen your audience efficiently, and increase book sales as a result are the questions answered for you in these pages. The method in this book involves multiple, discrete steps, but it’s kept simple as a program, deliberately uncomplicated, devoid of jargon, and thorough in its coverage of basic elements.
A 2012 survey by Cisco revealed that 82% of organizations have a Facebook presence, 68% have presence on Twitter, 68% have presence on LinkedIn. But less than 20% of organizations surveyed have built any cohesive strategy for using these social networks to interact and engage with their audience.
Your secret advantage to carve a path to higher book sales resides in the visibility that these tools create for you. Added to the overarching strategies we present here, you will find proven methods to save time often lost through wasteful experimenting. With the 14-step mixture we have identified for you, you’ll create a digital footprint that will carry you and your books far beyond the initial creation of your platform. When you build Web 2.0 interactivity tools into your plan, your author platform will magnetize audience over time through word of mouth, search engine optimization (SEO), and more.
There’s no way around the fact that the joys of receiving the world’s communications right in our pockets through a handheld device also means that you as an author must participate.
In these pages you’ll find a cohesive, overarching author strategy to reach your audience to lead them to your book. Outside of this book, you can find great ideas in many places, but this book is largely a response to author complaints about collecting sand particles of individual ideas that just don’t adhere and slip through their fingers. Authors need a well-defined platform strategy to implement with intelligence and efficiency. The end result of following the 14 steps? You’ll still have time to write and run your business, and you’ll still have your money staying securely in your wallet where it belongs.
The New Rules Apply to All Authors
New rules surround each wave of innovation, and those who align with these are able to progress toward their goals faster and easier.
These principles and strategies are based on new tools and new rules that work for and apply to all authors, whether you write fiction, children’s books, graphic novels, or whatever. We often talk in this book about defining and working in your “niche.” You can define that term as any genre you write in or any audience you write for. Customize from the examples we show you here and creatively spin them to fit your audience.
More people than ever are choosing to be heard through content and the written word, so chaos and confusion is at an all-time high among book buyers. If an author is not findable on the web, we run the risk of lost sales. With mass production and self-publishing being so easy, we’ve seen a rise in some poor-quality content that actually sells because of confusion about whether it’s a quality product or junk.
Why Are There 14 Steps?
There is no way around the fact that an author can no longer have a book appear in the bookstore, do a book signing, and expect the book to sell in large numbers—that is, unless you already have a strong platform and following.
Why 14 steps? Because people are now tuned in to many locations, including their laptops, phones, and tablets, not to mention radio, video, television, and auditoriums, so authors need to show up in as many of those locations as they can.
The danger you face is this: If your own author platform is created badly, you may lose readers to an inferior product that was simply easier to find because its platform was superior to yours.
To get the word out about your book, it’s necessary to write great content, appear in many media, and then distribute to as many of these places as possible. It’s important to understand how content is best delivered, with such visual elements as photos, diagrams, videos, and audio. Multi-distribution includes making sure your materials are mobile-friendly so that they are easily accessed on any device.
It’s a necessity for authors to post social content across multiple social media sites, a process that we simplify for you in this book. Volume isn’t the answer: It’s not just enough to post, post, post. Whether you’re writing a post, video blogging, or tweeting, your posts need to be well timed and well crafted to begin a conversation, easy to digest, and really, really easy to share. If you set up your platform using the strategies in this book, you’ll have an efficient communications framework to engage with your audience, no matter what site, device, or media they are using.
How This Book Is Organized
Each element of this 14-step author platform is organized into one step per chapter so that authors can stop between steps or read only the steps that they need.
This book is intended as an “elements of” title, a guidebook. Our goal is to save authors time as they quickly and easily build a successful platform. We don’t intend for a single chapter to substitute for a whole book on a particular aspect of an author platform; we focus on what you need to know to create this step in your platform. You can go far beyond if you have the time and inclination, since there are whole books written on each step in this book. For every step, we include additional reading, in many cases books written by our author clients.
Each chapter includes these sections:
Why you need this: In this section, we motivate! This section encourages you to stretch your boundaries and gives you a rationale for including this step in your platform.
Strategy: After motivation, we give a section on author strategy for using that step and show how it works together with the whole 14-step platform. According to Cisco’s study mentioned earlier, even though all businesses are using social networking in one way or another, less than 20% have any type of strategy about how they are using it; there is a lot of trial and error, frustration, and wasted time while overcoming the learning curve. The method in this book is pre-digested specially for authors, simply presented to show how to craft a strong platform as an author so that the framework is solid and can be built upon as time goes on.
How To: Step-by-step advice on the fastest route our authors have found and advice on getting each of the 14 steps accomplished. It’s a high priority to show you how to save time, prioritize, and automate as much as possible while maintaining an authentic, consistent voice throughout your author platform. Using our own authors’ experiences as a guide, we try to show you the quickest route to get where you need to go.
Best Practices: You say you don’t have time to create a platform? These sections are taken from successful author practices that were already gleaned through trial and error to find what works best. We don’t focus on “worst practices,” although we will occasionally point some out if we have heard authors mention notable errors that they’ve seen over and over.
Simple Model: Where appropriate, we give a model format for a speech, an article, a short book launch event, etc. You can use the exact format we give you as your own model to save time, or you can customize further depending on your schedule and budget. We give you the essentials, and you can build from there in a way that’s appropriate for your goals.
Final steps: Each chapter ends with a checklist covering the main chapter points. We also summarize all of these end-of-chapter steps as a worksheet at the back of the book to jump-start your author platform.
Success Stories: End-of-chapter success spotlights provide solid advice for authors looking to successfully build audience.
Read the Book Through …
If you are just starting out, it’s easy to follow the 14 steps to get up and running with an efficient author platform that will serve you for many years to come. We advise reading through all the steps sequentially, even if, as most authors, you already have a presence in some of these areas. Use the standalone chapters in this book to supercharge, revamp, and consolidate any platform segments you already have created, and keep revisiting the book as a whole to catch things you may have missed in creating any portion of your platform.
… But First, Take the “Acid Test”
Try this self-assessment now. Google the name Dan Brown (thriller fiction) or David Meerman Scott (nonfiction), both authors with well-developed web presence. Immediately on the results page you’ll see photos, books, considerable social network presences, URLs for websites and blogs, and more. Now type in your own name and see what appears. If your presence is not as easily identifiable, that should give you all the motivation you need! Follow the points in this book beginning with Step 1, creating your author website. After following all 14 steps in this book, type your own name again to see the profound transformation of your professional online author identity. These tools and techniques work for authors regardless of genre. Fiction authors need to connect to readers as much as nonfiction authors, and in these pages we suggest paths and examples for both nonfiction and fiction authors.
Then Build Your Author Platform
As you follow and build your author platform with the 14 steps in this book, when you or one of your readers searches your name, you’ll find professional, impressive search results about you and your book that are clear and well-organized. Your fans will get an optimal first impression of you and will be set on an easy path toward finding out more about you and your book. By harnessing the power of the Internet and learning how the various online tools in your toolbox work together, you’ll lead your audience to your unique message and author brand.
The sound of platform necessity coming was like a locomotive in the distance, and it has arrived.
Good luck! There’s no time like the present to begin. Build your platform right the first time, and as time goes on you’ll see it grow with minimal effort. Devote the time you need to plan, customize, and execute your platform. Once created, it will take on a life of its own that works to increase your book sales for many years to come.
Visit our book site at BuildAuthorPlatform.com for links, new information, and more. Please contact us at jelenpub.com and michaelmccallister.com for Q&A on our blogs, and please participate in future editions of this book by sending in your success tips and stories via our website and the Contact Us form.
