How to Build Your Author Platform

If you don't know already, marketing and actually selling your book is that hardest part of all, because this is where you face the competition. It should not be contentions competition, because most authors are only too happy to help other authors and there are hundreds fo web sites and groups that attest to that, but still, when all is said and done, it is done to you and no-one else to sell your books, if you do not have a traditional publisher or agent.

There are many tools you can use but ultimately they are all bolt-on's to your author platform. Your author platform should be the base from where you foray out of publcising missions and to where people come to find out more about you and your work. It's a bit like an oil rig in the swirling sea of the Internet with all your publicity tools hanging off it.

The first thing to note is that you cannot start building your platform early enough. As soon as you decide to write a book is not too soon, neither is before the thought enters your head, because you can always use it for publicising some other venture, for writing and selling a book is just a business and the principles are the same.

You get something that is of saleable quality, gain a reputation, find people who like and want that sort of thing and sell it to them. Your author platform will help you build that reputation and shine like a beacon, a landing light on your helipad, if you like, for those who want to find you or someone like you.

The most important tool in you array is your web site. This is where you can talk about yourself, your books, promote yourself and your books and provide links for people to buy your books. It could be a blog, a static web site or both. The difference between a web site and a blog is that you can add pages to a web site and they are always visible - right there in the menu, whereas a blog is more dynamic, allows interaction and is favoured by search engines, but post appear to disappear after a while.

I| recommend having both on the same URL with a link in each to the other, then you can put your important static information on your web site and use your blog as a note pad to your fans and they can use it to write back to you.

Try to create a common feel across all your platform's tools, that is use the same colours, photos, style, fonts and banners, etc. It is a good idea to build a list of fans, readers and buyers, so you should have an opt-in form of both tools loading names into the one list. This is cheap enough, but you really ought to have an autoresponder attached to it to deliver sequential messages automatically, but they are not cheap, until you have quite a few sign-ups on that list.

Other than that, standard SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) rules apply.

In a similar vein, you need Facebook these days. Facebook is so popular with the young that "going on line" has become synonymous with using Facebook. They email, carry out searches, chat with friends and share photos all from within it. Millions of young people will never see your web site, but they might see your Facebook.

In fact you will need two pages: one as a hub and then another. So, the second rig, your first page is about you and the secondary pages, your so-called fan pages, are about your books. It is these secondary pages that can be "LIKED", the main page can only be "FOLLOWED". Therefore,  people will FOLLOW YOU, but LIKE your book(s).

You can have as many fan pages as you like, but only one hub. The hub, should be as much as your web site and blog as you can make it, and the fan page can be more about your book.

You also need a Twitter account, or at least one, depending on your tactics. You could have one in your name and one in the name of the star of your book. Twitter doesn't mind that and they will link your accounts in their system, but that does not show up in the world outside their servers. Once again, you can customise your Twitter pages with the same photos and background images as you have used before.

Twitter is actually better for selling than Facebook, but you stil need both for different reasons.

You will start by trying to gain followers and that is fine, it is part of the daily routing, but learn to use #hashtages to reach and even wider audience than the few following you in the beginning. Even with only one follower, you can reach thousands, if you use the right #hashtags. It is a good idea to Google it soon and learn how to leverage these "categories".

These few tactics will take you a very long way to building your own author platform but you needn't stop there. Once they are up, you can add on others like YouTube, if you like video and many do; LInkedIn, a business platform; Tumblr, Google+...

Oh! there are a dozens of them, which is why I said that it is never too early to start building your author platform.

Caution : you will have to schedule time every day or a few times a week to produce material to be added to your author platform. Thankfully, on most of them, it is possible to schedule the posting of new content at the best time possible to reach your target audience.

Helene Voyer