Let me say upfront, I’m not exactly an expert as far as Author platforms go. I’ve only had a few short stories published and am currently working on my first novel. But building a platform is daunting, especially if you’re only writing on the side. It feels that every minute you spend with your platform is one less that you could be working on your books. So I thought I’d share what I’m learning as I’m go because sometimes it’s hard to remember where you started by the time you get to the end.
The first thing you want to do is start now. Don’t wait until you’re ready to send out a book to work on your platform, because it doesn’t happen overnight. With that said, here are some other questions to answers before diving in.
- How much time do you have? Meaning what time can you give from your writing schedule to dedicate to your platform. I try to fit all my blogging in on Friday mornings. It’s what works for me. Maybe you like to do a little every night for half an hour. Figure this out then you can figure out where to build your brand.
- Blog or Site? You have two directions you can go for an author landing page, a blog or a website. If you don’t have a lot of time that you can give up, you’ll want to do a site. It’s a mostly static page with contact info. There are some ways to make this fresh, which we’ll talk about later. If you feel like you can write at least one quality post a week, go for a blog. That’s what I do, I post twice a week right now (Monday and Wednesday.)
- What’s your address? No matter what site you start on, you’ll want to pay for your own web address. While switching your address later is an option, why wouldn’t you just start off with your own. Web addresses are not that expensive (I think I pay about $15 a year for mine) and it makes your name the spotlight. If you have a common name you may have to add “writer” to the address or use initials or get more clever (you can try different combinations at godaddy.com,) but definitely buy your own address.
- Pay for a host: Buying an address and paying for a host are two different things. Paying for a hosting site will run you around $100 a year depending on if you do add-ons and what service you use. My site is a wordpress.org hosted through Bluehost. I’ve been super happy using them and haven’t had any problems. You can connect a wordpress.org account or a Weebly account easily through them. Since I’ve used WordPress for the most part, I’ll be talking a lot about them, but I’ve also heard a lot of good things about Squarespace, who does their own hosting. (I do know Squarespace has a built in store options, so if you’re going the indie route that might be the way to go.)
- Check out other Author sites: Look at the sites for other authors in your nitch. What do you like and not like about their site? You start to see some things that are common among them, but don’t copy them exactly. You’ll want your site to stand out, so also look at what they don’t have that you can bring to the table.
And here’s the ever lovely don’t list:
- Don’t try to monetize: you want to make money selling books, not by blogging. That was something I got a little sidetracked by when I first started this site. There is a lot of great information out there about blogging, but a lot of it is written by creatives that are trying to make money blogging and selling either classes, printables, or handmades. You are trying to sell a book, so you’re trying to build a place to connect with people and make your writing known.
- Don’t try to do everything: Less is more if all you have time to do is twitter, then only do twitter. Signing up for every social site out there then doing nothing with any of them because you get overwhelmed is worse than having only one.
- Don’t quit because you miss a week or two: The reason all my other blogs failed was because as soon as I missed a day I gave up. I thought myself a failure. Don’t do this. Just go back to your schedule. And you don’t need to apologize and bring it to light, just get back on the horse.