Timothy's Thoughts

Your platform is essentially the people who willingly listen to you. I’ve said before that platform is your capacity to influence people. We must earn the right to influence people. The reason you are able to influence people is because they have given you the right to influence them. Most people have sense enough not to give that right away too freely. We must earn the right to influence people. This is just as true with an online platform as it is with any other social platform. Subconsciously, every visitor has asked the question Why should I visit this site? It Answers a Question If a user finds a site through a search engine, he is probably looking for the answer to a very specific question. If the site appears in the search results and the title and summary statement imply that the site will answer the question, the user clicks the link. But a platform this does not make. Even if the user finds the exact answer he was looking for, there is no guarantee that he will ever return. ...

W hat does it take to build a platform online? I look at blogs and I ask myself why one blog is successful and another isn't. I particular, I look at the blogs run by literary agents and I compare them to those run by authors. As a general rule, literary agents have blogs that have several times the followers that successful authors have. How do we explain this? There is a theory that as long as you write great posts, your blog will succeed. I won’t say that literary agents aren’t capable of writing great post, but if we are looking for someone who can write “great” posts, doesn’t is stand to reason that the typical bestselling writer should be able to write better posts than the typical literary agent ? But the numbers don’t add up that way. The reason this happens is fairly simple. Literary agents are doing what is essentially selling bottled water in the desert . If you’re out in the desert with a bunch of people, the guy selling bottle water is a popular guy. What literary...

I had intended to post about the differences between platform and marketing on this blog, but the article grew too long (1,200+ words). When posts grow too long, I move them to my website, which has a design better suited for long articles. It is also better for people who want to print the article and read it offline. Follow the link below if you would like to read the article: The Game of Platform Development

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...

Writers talk much about platform and many have learned to hate the word, but only the people who don’t have one. They look at platform as the most difficult thing in writing. Oddly enough, there are certain groups of people who have an instant platform. I’ll pick on Rachelle Gardner. When did she join Wordserve Literary? Late 2007, I think? How many people are listed as followers of her blog now? While you go check, let me point out that Rachelle has several years experience in the publishing industry and I don’t want to take away from that by mentioning her, but the fast popularity growth of her blog is largely due to instant platform in the publishing industry. Professionals with the same experience level in other fields will not see their blogs grow at the same rate. But new literary agents and publishers can put out a sign on a blog saying, “I’m an agent” or “I’m a publisher” and aspiring authors will flock to them. It helps if they have something useful to say, but it isn’t a r...

One of the biggest concerns for non-fiction authors is platform. Publishers demand that authors have a platform , but most authors not only don’t have a platform , they don’t know what one is and they don’t know how to get one. In simplest terms, an author’s platform is the author’s foundation. Figuratively, the author stands on his platform , much like a speaker would a soap box or a podium, and proclaims his message to the world. As with speakers, authors prefer to have a true podium over a soap box, but we must earn that right. Many things in life are complete in three parts. The author’s platform is no different. The three things that go into a platform are expertise , recognition and subject interest . The strength of the platform depends on an author having adequate portions of all three. Expertise comes from many different things. A Bible scholar, for example, may have gained his expertise by attending a seminary or by years of Bible study on his own, but one thing is cert...

Fiction is harder to write than non-fiction, or it should be. When you write fiction, you have to make it up as you go. When a writer writes non-fiction, he should know his subject well enough that he doesn’t have to make anything up, he just has to figure out the best order for the information and find a way to get the point across to the reader. Let me show you what I mean. A college professor has spent years studying fish. One day the dean comes to him and says, “I want you to write a book. It will make the college look better.” Now the professor could decide to write about the history of Egypt. “That will give me a chance to learn about Egypt.” But he won’t do that. Instead, he will go to his files, pull out his work from the past several years and he will write about fish. In all likelihood, he could write much of the book from memory, but he will use his work and the work of others to insure the accuracy of his statements. That brings us back to the subject of platform. Our platf...

Last week I mentioned the writer’s platform . It is a term that is thrown around a lot, but it isn’t always used in a meaningful way. The dictionary definition of a platform is a position of authority or prominence that provides a good opportunity for doing something . Let’s consider what this means. A platform is not the same as a fan base . Many people look at celebrities. A movie star’s platform is based on his prominence. He can be as stupid as a fence post, but people will listen to him because of his prominence. People start to think that this means that how many people you can get to listen is more important than what you know. If we look at the other piece of the definition, a platform is a position of authority . Do people really listen to the political statements that movie stars make? Not really. Some of them have a lot to say, but most people just ignore them, but if a Senator gets up to speak, people listen. They may not agree, but they listen. The Senator has a positio...

An author writes a non-fiction book and sends it to an agent. The agent sends back a reply, You have made the subject easy to understand, but I am unable to offer representation at this time because your platform is weak. The author looks at this response and asks, what is a platform and how do I get one? Many authors go at this process backwards. A platform is not something you need to build if you hope to sell a book you have already written. The platform is what gives you the authority to write the book in the first place. It also makes it a whole lot easier to write the book. Let’s look at an extreme example. Suppose a fourteen-year-old student writes a book about how to drive a car. True, the student may have some very good thoughts on the subject, but without having ever driven a car, he isn’t going to have the experience that someone like the current NASCAR points leader has. The guy from NASCAR has a platform. The student has opinions. We develop platforms in many ways. Someti...