Simple Ways to Build Your Platform

Christina Katz has a great article in the March/April issue of Writers Digest on 50 simple ways to build your platform in 5 minutes a day. The constant throughout her piece is this: always be thinking about your book and how you can incorporate it into what is going on in the world. We give our clients this piece of advice frequently. This is one of the reasons we suggest that our authors start blogs. Many of them are apprehensive about venturing into blog territory. They are filled with questions like, “How do I build up traffic to my blog?” and “What do I write about?” Our advice is simple, just write. You will find that you start gravitating towards similar topics, topics that you cover in your writing, topics that you are passionate about. Putting yourself on a writing schedule, motivating yourself to write daily with a nonfiction hook  is a great way to start generating ideas and recognizing angles for your work to be covered. Train your brain to look for hooks everywhere and you will begin to develop angles that you can pitch to publications or websites. Search online for people writing about similar topics and connect with them. Build your online network and share and cultivate ideas.

Katz recommends that writers master the 5-minute release. “Zoom in on the latest happenings, holidays and story hooks and tie your book into it. Write 5-minute mini-press releases and send them out regularly.” Sometimes authors find themselves overwhelmed by all the great ideas they have for promoting their work that they don’t actually take the time to write them down and actively pursue them. Ideas should be written down as they occur, who knows which one is going to be the tipping point for your success.