author's platform

I’m up rather early this morning, so how about I start sharing some of the steps I’ve been taking toward getting published?  Maybe I should go back to the beginning when I started writing my book.  See…even early on, I knew at some point my writing would necessitate a very engaging presence on social media.  Of course back then, I had no idea there was an actual label for that presence.  The publishing industry refers to it as the “author’s platform”.  And it is INDEED a platform.  Unlike years ago, the publishing industry now looks to authors to grow their own base of followers through as many social media outlets as possible PRIOR to their work being published.  Of course that adds a pretty tall hurdle for writers, and a very big preoccupation for them, as well.  In addition to the very time-consuming occupation of producing material that ultimately can be sold at some future point to a target audience, writers now are expected to preoccupy themselves with identifying and then creating that target audience.

Yep… it’s a big deal and a whole lot of work, too, but if you step back and think about it, it’s the same thing that small businesses throughout the world do every single day.  In order to survive as a small business with any hopes of becoming a bigger business, the business owner must wear all the hats.  All of them.  They must take all the risk, too.  And this point brings me to my next observation and now firsthand exposure to the publishing industry:  It is quite focused on risk, or at least their definition of risk.  At this early stage of my experience with the publishing process, most of what I’ve researched and now witnessed through querying my initial batch of literary agents (more on that later) is that there’s almost NO interest or consideration for creative material if the author platform does not exist, especially for new authors of nonfiction.

By the way, my book is categorized as “non-fiction” even though most of what I write about is how our imaginations affect our mindsets.  Of course, all fiction comes from our imaginations.  In other words (if we’re splitting hairs), I think my book is about showing how our own fiction becomes non-fiction.   At any rate in terms of publishing, my book is categorized as non-fiction self-help.

Honestly… prior to writing my book, I’d never really thought much about the fact that almost everything on the planet needs to be categorized and how much time we devote to placing things into categories, but now having written about it, I think about it quite often.  See… once you start to live more consciously, you start to think about a lot of things you’ve never really thought about.  Like I said, living more consciously takes some getting used to… but living more consciously certainly does help you make more sense of the world.  It certainly has for me.

Coincidentally, I even devoted a whole chapter to our love of labeling in my book.  It’s Day Six of the Twenty-One days and it’s a chapter on passing judgment.  The title of the chapter is, “What’s the Rush”.  Like all my other chapters, I look forward to sharing it with you.  Again though… my ability to share my material with you depends largely on your participation, so please do that social media thing and “like” it.  🙂