Build Your Author Platform. Carole Jelen

increase book sales as a result are the questions answered for you in these pages. The method in this book involves multiple, discrete steps, but it’s kept simple as a program, deliberately uncomplicated, devoid of jargon, and thorough in its coverage of basic elements.

       A 2012 survey by Cisco revealed that 82% of organizations have a Facebook presence, 68% have presence on Twitter, 68% have presence on LinkedIn. But less than 20% of organizations surveyed have built any cohesive strategy for using these social networks to interact and engage with their audience.

      Your secret advantage to carve a path to higher book sales resides in the visibility that these tools create for you. Added to the overarching strategies we present here, you will find proven methods to save time often lost through wasteful experimenting. With the 14-step mixture we have identified for you, you’ll create a digital footprint that will carry you and your books far beyond the initial creation of your platform. When you build Web 2.0 interactivity tools into your plan, your author platform will magnetize audience over time through word of mouth, search engine optimization (SEO), and more.

       There’s no way around the fact that the joys of receiving the world’s communications right in our pockets through a handheld device also means that you as an author must participate.

      In these pages you’ll find a cohesive, overarching author strategy to reach your audience to lead them to your book. Outside of this book, you can find great ideas in many places, but this book is largely a response to author complaints about collecting sand particles of individual ideas that just don’t adhere and slip through their fingers. Authors need a well-defined platform strategy to implement with intelligence and efficiency. The end result of following the 14 steps? You’ll still have time to write and run your business, and you’ll still have your money staying securely in your wallet where it belongs.

      The New Rules Apply to All Authors

       New rules surround each wave of innovation, and those who align with these are able to progress toward their goals faster and easier.

      These principles and strategies are based on new tools and new rules that work for and apply to all authors, whether you write fiction, children’s books, graphic novels, or whatever. We often talk in this book about defining and working in your “niche.” You can define that term as any genre you write in or any audience you write for. Customize from the examples we show you here and creatively spin them to fit your audience.

      More people than ever are choosing to be heard through content and the written word, so chaos and confusion is at an all-time high among book buyers. If an author is not findable on the web, we run the risk of lost sales. With mass production and self-publishing being so easy, we’ve seen a rise in some poor-quality content that actually sells because of confusion about whether it’s a quality product or junk.

      

      Why Are There 14 Steps?

      There is no way around the fact that an author can no longer have a book appear in the bookstore, do a book signing, and expect the book to sell in large numbers—that is, unless you already have a strong platform and following.

      Why 14 steps? Because people are now tuned in to many locations, including their laptops, phones, and tablets, not to mention radio, video, television, and auditoriums, so authors need to show up in as many of those locations as they can.

       The danger you face is this: If your own author platform is created badly, you may lose readers to an inferior product that was simply easier to find because its platform was superior to yours.

      To get the word out about your book, it’s necessary to write great content, appear in many media, and then distribute to as many of these places as possible. It’s important to understand how content is best delivered, with such visual elements as photos, diagrams, videos, and audio. Multi-distribution includes making sure your materials are mobile-friendly so that they are easily accessed on any device.

      It’s a necessity for authors to post social content across multiple social media sites, a process that we simplify for you in this book. Volume isn’t the answer: It’s not just enough to post, post, post. Whether you’re writing a post, video blogging, or tweeting, your posts need to be well timed and well crafted to begin a conversation, easy to digest, and really, really easy to share. If you set up your platform using the strategies in this book, you’ll have an efficient communications framework to engage with your audience, no matter what site, device, or media they are using.

      How This Book Is Organized

      Each element of this 14-step author platform is organized into one step per chapter so that authors can stop between steps or read only the steps that they need.

      This book is intended as an “elements of” title, a guidebook. Our goal is to save authors time as they quickly and easily build a successful platform. We don’t intend for a single chapter to substitute for a whole book on a particular aspect of an author platform; we focus on what you need to know to create this step in your platform. You can go far beyond if you have the time and inclination, since there are whole books written on each step in this book. For every step, we include additional reading, in many cases books written by our author clients.

      Each chapter includes these sections:

      Why you need this: In this section, we motivate! This section encourages you to stretch your boundaries and gives you a rationale for including this step in your platform.

      Strategy: After motivation, we give a section on author strategy for using that step and show how it works together with the whole 14-step platform. According to Cisco’s study mentioned earlier, even though all businesses are using social networking in one way or another, less than 20% have any type of strategy about how they are using it; there is a lot of trial and error, frustration, and wasted time while overcoming the learning curve. The method in this book is pre-digested specially for authors, simply presented to show how to craft a strong platform as an author so that the framework is solid and can be built upon as time goes on.

      How To: Step-by-step advice on the fastest route our authors have found and advice on getting each of the 14 steps accomplished. It’s a high priority to show you how to save time, prioritize, and automate as much as possible while maintaining an authentic, consistent voice throughout your author platform. Using our own authors’ experiences as a guide, we try to show you the quickest route to get where you need to go.

      Best Practices: You say you don’t have time to create a platform? These sections are taken from successful author practices that were already gleaned through trial and error to find what works best. We don’t focus on “worst practices,” although we will occasionally point some out if we have heard authors mention notable errors that they’ve seen over and over.

      

      Simple Model: Where appropriate, we give a model format for a speech, an article, a short book launch event, etc. You can use the exact format we give you as your own model to save time, or you can customize further depending on your schedule and budget. We give you the essentials, and you can build from there in a way that’s appropriate for your goals.

      Final steps: Each chapter ends with a checklist covering the main chapter points. We also summarize all of these end-of-chapter steps as a worksheet at the back of the book to jump-start your author platform.

      Success Stories: End-of-chapter success spotlights provide solid advice for authors looking to successfully build audience.

      Read the Book Through …

      If you are just starting out, it’s easy to follow the 14 steps to get up and running with an efficient author platform that will serve you for many years to come. We advise reading through all the steps sequentially, even if, as most authors, you already have a presence in some of these areas. Use the standalone chapters in this book to supercharge, revamp, and consolidate any platform segments you already have created, and keep revisiting the book as a whole to catch things you may have missed in creating