Get Started on Your Marketing Platform (Part 1) (January 2007)
Get Started on Your Marketing Platform (Part 1)
by Philip Martin
Great Lakes Literary, LLC

A writer’s marketing platform does what a physical platform does. It provides a structural support to give you more visibility. It lifts you up so you can more easily be seen and heard. On your platform, you stand out from the crowd.

Whether you are writing fiction or nonfiction, a platform does two specific things. First, it demonstrates past achievement in your field. Second, it reveals an existing market for your work: past customers and media who are likely to purchase or help promote your next work. It shows an interested editor or agent that you bring to the table a track record of success and readership.

Logically, editors and agents prefer to work with authors who have strong platforms; it makes their efforts more likely to succeed. They love writers that know how to help identify and reach an audience. Yes, all editors and agents want to discover new voices, but their bread and butter is in helping successful authors and self-promoters publish more work.

Note: your platform is a pre-existing condition, something that is in place when you make your pitch. It has nothing to do with what you intend or hope to do. A desire to be on Oprah is not a platform, it’s a wish. It’s only a platform if you've been on her show as an expert on a given topic – and are likely to be invited back again or can leverage that past appearance into attention from other media.

What are typical elements of a platform?

1. Media Contacts. A list of impressive, active media contacts from past or current activities.

2. Speaking Opportunities. Frequent invitations to speak to groups, such as a college lecture series, or being a featured guest at conferences or on major broadcast media or Internet sites.

3. Significant Role with a Well-known Organization. An important position with a major university, institute, organization, or professional association likely to impress others in your target audience.

4. Publication Credits and Awards. A public reputation as an expert in your field, with credentials that include published articles (if nonfiction) or stories that appeared in prestigious magazines or placed high in noteworthy contests (if fiction).

5. Quotable and Impressive Praise from Others. Recognition of your influential role and quality of work in the form of glowing recommendations, blurbs, testimonials, or reviews by noteworthy people or publications.

6. Active Vehicles to Promote your Work. A regular print, broadcast, or Internet vehicle such as blog, e-newsletter, syndicated print column, or radio show, with an audience of many individuals who actually read or listen to what you have to say.

7. Popular Website. This might be your own author site. More impressive is a topical site that provides info or products for a well-defined niche or general audience, with many visitors.

8. Anything that Impresses and Reaches People. Anything else that shows that you have a real audience of people interested in you and your work and that you have a way to reach them with new material.

While a platform’s impact cannot be measured precisely, many elements are measurable. Their relative size has a corresponding ability to impress someone reviewing your work. A story published in a major magazine is more influential than one in a minor rag. An e-newsletter can be measured in the size of its active list. Blogs and websites have rankings or numbers of subscribers or visitors. A 10-stop lecture tour is better than a 5-stop tour – if the sizes of cities are comparable. A drive-time radio interview in a major metropolitan area is better than a late-night chat in a small market.

Don’t despair! While you may not score high with your current platform, you can take steps to strengthen what you have. Modest actions add up. As with most things in life, you build a platform one plank at a time.

In most cases, it’s best to start with small steps to build the simplest of platforms. A part-time writer might just tackle one minor activity per month. A full-time writer may spend a day a week to market specific pieces and work now and then on an overall platform. Aggressive authors typically spend more on marketing themselves: doing radio interviews, pitching stories, writing popular blogs, being an expert often quoted or a speaker much in demand.

Be realistic. It’s not likely you will get invited to be on Oprah next month. It’s more likely you can start with local venues or existing contacts. How much time can you spend? How much money? Will you build it yourself, or hire others to do all or part?

For this initial look at how to improve your platform, I’ll suggest four basic things to get you going in the right direction.

1. Review and rewrite your 1-paragraph bio to improve its impact. This is a great place to start. As the shortest version of who you are and what you’ve done, this is the quick profile that editors or agents will most likely see first, whether on a website or in a pitch letter.

2. Review and rewrite your 1-page bio sheet. This is a longer version of your relevant credentials and experience. Ideally, you have enough for a single page. It should not be cluttered. Succinct, confident, and powerful is more impressive. Give the impression that it’s just the tip of the iceberg. If you’ve been reviewed or published in major media, feature those; don’t dilute the impact by listing every smaller-market activity. List the most major affiliations, awards, successful activities, marketing channels, and so on.

3. Start a rev/test sheet. For a press kit (online or print version), one piece I recommend is a single sheet of reviews and testimonials. This is sometimes referred to as a “rev/test” sheet. Compile your best blurbs from the most influential sources, using perhaps eight to a dozen quotes, short and sweet, from individuals or publications, praising your work. Excerpt with ellipses (. . .) to allow a reader to scan the best parts. Again, you want to give the impression that this is just a small sampling of an immense quantity of praise.

If you create a rev/test sheet, the bio sheet (Item #2 above) can focus on you and your tangible output and activities – with maybe a teaser line or two from a great review or blurb. The rev/test sheet then chimes in with what other people have said about your work. Together, these two sheets deliver a nice one-two punch. Of course, early in your career, these two pieces can start out as one combined sheet, then be separated later as they grow.

4. Start a platform work log: brief notes on what you've done and a running list of best ideas to pursue next. Personally, I try to address at least one new idea a month.

In totality, building a new platform from scratch can seem overwhelming. But tackling one small piece a month, you will make steady progress. Look for consistency, for things that complement each other (a good platform is an interlocking structure), and in general for things that build a picture of you as an active, well-connected person in your field.

That’s a quick look at what a marketing platform is and how to begin to strengthen one. Remember, a well-built platform will last a long time. Take a few moments in the coming week or two to review and improve a small, useful piece of yours.


Copyright 2007 by Philip Martin, director of Great Lakes Literary, LLC, and series editor of The New Writer’s Handbook, an annual anthology. All rights reserved. For permission to reprint, contact the author at www.GreatLakesLit.com. Any brief quoted passages from published works are used for the purpose of literary criticism.

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