High Heeled Shoes, Oil Rigs, and Writers, Part I

I'll admit, I'm a little exhausted this week. After a few days of physical illness, an all-day writers' conference that I helped coordinate, a 14 mile run, and a migraine headache, I'm ready for a few days of rest. This is my last week before I have to start seriously planning for the fall semester of teaching, so I'm going to enjoy it.

That means I'm going to take Chuck Sambuchino's advice and steal from myself for the next three weeks. For those of you who don't know, Chuck is a successful author, speaker, and edits for Writer's Digest. I met him at a writers' conference this year. Really nice guy and someone you should listen to if you're a writer. Why? Because he's a VERY successful writer. He didn't get that way overnight: he worked for it. He built his platform from the ground up and he knows his business. He even wrote a book about it which I reviewed in the newsletter for our state writers' guild. It's called Create Your Writer Platform. My only quibble is the numbering is off from the table of contents to the actual pages, but it's close enough you can find what you're looking for. It's probably an update and no one thought to update the TOC. Go figure.

In any case, I used this book and a couple of others to do a presentation on creating a writer's platform for the conference I helped coordinate. In that presentation I came to the following conclusions:

1. A writer's platform is a stage you build to stand above the crowd so others easily find you among the myriad of other choices.

2. A writer's platform is constructed of three basic parts: your public presence, your publishing presence, and your web presence.

3. If you don't start building your platform early--as in months to years before your book is published--you won't have a leg to stand on for publicity and marketing when you book does launch.

So in the next couple of weeks I'll be sharing parts of my presentation with you and hopefully you'll find the information helpful. The books I used as references, at least, should be full of gold. I don't get any royalties off of selling them, but I do like to pass along helpful information.

Buy Chuck's book. Read it. Follow his advice. It helped me triple my blog hits in three months. I had to work for it, but that's when you know you're doing something right.

If something's not working, revise what you're doing. Who says jumping horses mid-stream is a bad idea?

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Next main course on Revision is a Dish Best Served Cold: 

Building Writer Platforms Part II

Also look for my articles on Walrus Publishing’s website. 

Currently: Adverbaholics Anonymous

Like Ghost Stories? I’m published in Rocking Horse Publishing’s Spirits of St. Louis: Missouri Ghost Stories. Check it out!