The Fiction Platform: Two Parts Easy, the Third...
We say that publishers don’t care about platform with fiction. In theory, a great story is all that matters, but hey, if you happen to have a loyal following then even better. For a while now, I’ve been trying to think of a way to explain this. At first, I thought that we might look at fiction platform as different from non-fiction platform . You may recall that the non-fiction platform is composed of expertise , recognition and public interest . My thought was that two are these are missing from the fiction platform and then I realized, it isn’t that they are missing, they are non-issues. Look at expertise and recognition . If a novel were true, we would expect the author to be a recognized authority concerning the events. Since the novel is made up by the author, he is the recognized authority. There is nothing he can do to increase his expertise or the recognition of it (aside from telling more people about the novel). That means that any weakness in the platform is in the...