Platform 110 - Do Something For Your Readers by Nathan Lowell

Austin James has an interesting post about the pitfalls of social networking. I left him a rather long winded response pointing out what I believe is the difference between building a platform and networking with writers. Since I've talked a lot about what not to do, perhaps it's time to start talking about what to do instead.

I know I've said much of this before in other contexts, but I think it bears repeating.

Step 1. Finish Something.

Way too many people appear stuck in WIP mode. Ira Glass has a great series on YouTube about story telling. In Part 3 he talks about the idea that you really can't improve until you've done a large body of work. The implication of this is that you have to put your work out there and move on to the next piece - over and over and over. Endlessly polishing your WIP only delays the inevitable and is a pointless exercise. After a certain point, until you get it in front of an audience, you won't know what needs to be fixed.

Go finish it before you read on. We'll wait. It's that important. Until you have something upon which to base a platform, you cannot begin to build a platform. I know you have all this advice that says you need to start building the platform before you have your first publication. That advice should probably read "After you've written your first piece but before you try to get it published."

Step 2. Write to Your Readers

Everybody with an account at #amwriting.org has a blog. Most of you have blogs out there, too. The vast majority write articles about writing that are aimed at gathering a network of other writers. That's great.

Stop it.

Not forever. Just until you've established your platform.

Now that you've finished something, start a blog--yes, another blog, not your writer's blog. A different audience requires different content, which requires different presentation.

If you can afford it, buy a web host account from the likes of Bluehost.com or Dreamhost.com. I personally can recommend Bluehost. Hang out your shingle on the web now, before anybody knows you. Set up shop there. If you can't afford it, go to wordpress.com and set up your platform there. Later, when you can afford it, wordpress is easiest to migrate from. In the meantime you can create a professional appearance with minimal fuss.

How you want to arrange it is up to you. If you're looking for ideas about what to do there, look at the Murverse of Mur Lafferty or visit Scott Sigler's place or see what Seth Harwood or Brand Gamblin or Matt Selznick is doing. Notice that they're writing to their audiences. Mur has a podcast about writers for writers so you'll see a higher attention paid to the writing than on the others, but notice how she spins that because it's her audience.

Step 3. Lay The Foundation

This next part is tricky. You're going to give away your work. I know you want to get paid. Think of it as investing that $25 you might get paid for a short story in a solid foundation for your business.

What makes it tricky is how you go about putting it out there. I'm a strong proponent of podiobooks.com. By publishing in audio format, you have the advantage of "small pond" which means you're not competing against as many other people, and "high demand" because more and more people are finding that listening to a podcast on their daily commute or while they're working out or doing household chores is a lot more entertaining than the next pablum track from corporate radio. It also means you're not jeopardizing print rights. You can still sell that story because - while it has been published - it has not been published in print.

Step 4. Repeat

The period of repetition depends on the scope of your work. If you're working in short stories, a week is long enough. Novellas, take a month. Novels, one a year. Minimum. More is better. As Ira Glass points out, you have to do a lot of work before you really get better and by doing a lot of work, he's talking about actually producing a story, not spending your life polishing the same one.

That's a platform. In the beginning it might be just you but if you are able to leverage the tools and the writerly relationships you've been building, you can probably get a dozen people by the end of the week. Use Google Analytics to track your traffic if you're on your own blog. Wordpress.com has a traffic graph installed in its dashboard so you can see. The advice you got for promoting your work to other writers holds for promoting your work to readers. You don't need to spend a lot of time at it because, remember, you're going to produce work regularly for them and nothing promotes old work better than new work.

In a few months, you'll have enough for an anthology of shorts, or a collection of novellas. You can even begin thinking about self pub in e-formats for the shorter works almost immediately (something else to talk about with your readers). And, yes, people will buy the stuff they've already listened to.

One last tip: Plan to spend two years here. That probably seems like a lot, but think of it as an Associates Degree in Fiction Writing. If you were going to get an Associates in something, it would take two years of homework, reading, attending classes, and paying tuition. This isn't any different, except that you get to set the curriculum and it'll be much more focused that you'd get from a community college.

Good luck and keep writing. When you've got your new site up, leave a comment here and we'll all go look at it.