The
year 2013 was not the easiest for me or my family.
My
mother had to be moved from her home of 58 years to a retirement home, which
meant the “breaking up” of her house and the breaking up of where her three
sons had spent most of their formative years.
Work,
normally a state a barely controlled chaos, dropped the “barely controlled” and
went through severe regime change and was rather suddenly “under new
management.” Work demands on my time escalated, and sharply.
I
was trying to get a book manuscript completed (what was eventually published as
Poetry
at Work) and I know I was driving the editor frantic (on a good day)
and off the cliff (on a bad day) as we struggled, or I struggled, to get it
done. I was also trying to promote my second novel, A
Light Shining, published right at the end of 2012. That was three books
published in two years.
I
wasn’t think a lot about marketing and promotion.
I
don’t have a household name. I don’t have three million people following me on
Twitter, or hundreds of thousands of likes on Facebook or Google+. I’m not on
the public speaking circuit.
To
use the word that is the Holy Grail of agents and publishers everywhere, I don’t
have a platform. Or if I do, my platform is barely big enough to hold me and
two or three friends.
Publishers
like authors with a pre-existing platform – it helps guarantee sales, and
publishers like to make money. That’s how they stay in business. It makes
perfectly good business sense for a publisher to contract with, say, Justin
Bieber, rather than a more literary author. (It also provides an interesting
commentary on the state of American culture, but that’s another story.)
For
an author, it’s only marginally easier if you write non-fiction rather than
fiction. Self-help has been a major publishing category for much of the last
100 years. If you have a method or a formula that will seemingly help lots of
people do something they want to do – get hired, lose weight, deal with
difficult relatives, conquer depression – then you have a pre-existing platform
and audience. And the publisher may help you find it.
But
you, the author, have to work at it. I know the writer’s mantra – “I’m a writer
not a marketer” and “I’m an introvert not a gifted public speaker” (been there,
done that) – but the fact is that self-promotion of what you write isn’t a
luxury. Even the best and biggest publishers won’t do that for you, unless your
name is Jan Karon, Max Lucado or Karen Kingsbury in Christian publishing or
Stephen King and James Patterson in general publishing.
So
what about the rest of us?
In On Being a Writer: 12 Simple
Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts,
Ann
Kroeker (co-author with Charity Craig) has something simple yet
profound to say about this, and based on her own experience:
“Promotion and
marketing – whether speaking, radio interviews, social media interaction – are best
positioned as an extension of the original book (or story or poem) a writer
felt compelled to write down and submit for broader distribution.”
In
other words, the promotion and marketing you do for your writing is simply an extension of the story you’ve already
written.
I stumbled
partially (and rather marginally) into this with A Light Shining. To help promote the book, I interviewed
the two lead characters as if they were real people (and for me, they had
become essentially real people). While this didn’t result in a massive increase
in sales (in fact, I’m not sure of it increased sales at all), it’s this kind
of approach – understanding that your story doesn’t stop at the end of the book
– that will lead you in the direction of creating and building a “platform.”
And
this, too: your reading audience isn’t going to magically find you. You have to
find the audience.
Unfortunately,
that takes work, work that isn’t strictly writing. Seeing is as an extension of
your writing, part of the same creative process, will help.
