Hi everyone,

Sorry for the lapse in blogging. I haven't had a lot of spare time lately. With the suffering economy, my work hours are spent scurrying to put together marketing pieces in hopes of generating revenue for my company.

I'm sure many of you can relate in your own respective jobs. As the belt tightens the demand for more results rolls down the chain of command. In thinking about how that affects writers, my advice is this:

When you are pitching an article or a book idea, or even a way to help promote your book consider your customer (customer? yep... your customer... and by customer I mean the magazine or publisher that you're working with). Ask youself how does your idea benefit them. How will it help them sell more copies of their magazine or boost their book sales? Consider what the unique selling proposition will be for them and use that to pitch your idea.

Businesses are less and less interested in abstract/fun ideas and are asking for more and more numbers associated with whatever it is you're trying to do. By considering how your article/book/promotional idea will affect your publishing partner's bottom line, then you can make a better case for them taking a chance on your idea.

You can apply this concept to anything from your book proposal, to requesting some support for a publicity idea, such as a blog or radio tour.

Hang in there, and good luck.

A media kit can be a great tool for promoting your work and can be used to try to get mentions in publications or to try to get speaking engagements or  spots on radio or TV. 

A few do's and don'ts:

• Do include your complete contact information as well as your website/blog address
• Do include a personal biography and a photograph of yourself
• Do include a business card
• Do include any recent articles or endorsements
• Do include a good cover sheet that summarizes the contents of your media kit
• Do include a copy of your latest book
• Don't over do it--these days everyone is busy and have short attention spans. Keep it relevant and to the point.
• Don't include clippings of every press mention that you've ever gotten--go with either the most recent or the most impressive. Everything else can be summarized on your cover sheet (remember to be concise).

20 Dual Questions About Your Author Platform

#2: Who Needs a Platform? / Do You Need a Platform?

By Christina Katz

Without a platform, your writing career is invisible. Since visibility for the right reasons is always good for your writing career, you really can’t afford to be an isolated, eccentric soul waiting for somebody else to make you famous. Those days are gone forever.

The opposite attitude is an attitude of responsibility. When you decide to launch a writing career, you won’t just be writing. That’s only part of the job description. You’ll also be responsible for coming up with saleable ideas, pitching your writing, and building a marketing platform that will promote your work. (And that’s putting the job description for “writer” in very simplistic terms. The multiple “hats” writers wear on a regular basis are described in more detail in Writer Mama.)

I’m sure we’ve all experienced our fair share of resistance, as writers, I’m sure. And thanks to the Internet, our job description gets lengthier every single day. But the upside of all of this is that the more responsibility you take for your career – including the willingness to develop your platform, the more ownership you’ll have, the more invested you’ll be, and the better you’ll be able to leverage what you’ve already accomplished.

Question #2: Who needs a platform?

All writers do.

Your platform is a way to assess and broadcast the success you’ve accomplished so far, which typically leads to even more success.

Long story short, the sooner you become willing to take 100% responsibility for your writing career, the more successful you will be in the short and the long runs. Once you’ve taken responsibility, you’ll come to realize that if a task isn’t on your to-do list, it won’t ever get done. And once you understand that all of the jobs that fall under the description “writing professional” are yours, you are ready for a lot more success than the writer who simply shrugs and says, “I’m not doing that.”

In the final analysis, platform development takes time and effort, but it leverages your worth. If you are a professional, it only makes sense to consistently and incrementally work on increasing your actual and perceived value.

Shrug at your professional peril.

My question for you: Do you need a platform? Do you want others to know about the value that you consistently offer? Please share your experience by commenting to this post.

***

Christina Katz is author of Get Known Before the Book Deal, Use Your Personal Strengths to Build an Author Platform and Writer Mama, How to Raise a Writing Career Alongside Your Kids. She started her platform “for fun” seven years ago and ended up on Good Morning America. She works on incremental writing career development with one hundred students a year and is the publisher of the e-zine Writers on the Rise. Christina blogs at The Writer Mama Riffs, Get Known Before the Book Deal and Writers on the Rise.

Hi Writers,

Apologies again for my failure to keep up with the blog as of late. We've been going through a marketing restructuring at F+W Media, the parent company of Writer's Digest, so I've been assigned some new duties and am figuring out my new work flow.

Since I've been so busy I've enlisted the help of one of our authors, Christina Katz, to help me out with a guest post. Christina is the author of Writer Mama, a great book for moms who are also cultivating writing careers, and the forthcoming Get Known Before the Book Deal (November 2008). She always has great advice for managing the business side of your writing career and in this post shares some about "author platforms". Enjoy.

20 Dual Questions About Your Author Platform

#1: What’s a Platform? / What’s Your Platform?

By Christina Katz

The toughest part about growing a platform that will eventually help you land a book deal is getting started. You probably know by now that you need a platform. You may have heard the buzz about it at a conference, online or even in writing publications like Writer’s Digest magazine.

But even with all of this information, it's still easy to be confused about where the heck to start. To simplify the process for both of us, I’ve divided platform development from start to finish into twenty questions. Each week, I’ll answer a question and then you will answer a question. By the time we’re done, you will have a solid understanding of platform-ese (the language of platform) and how to use words and more to construct your best possible platform at this time.

Question #1: What’s a platform?

The word platform simply describes all the ways you are visible and appealing to your future, potential, or actual readership. Platform development is important not only for already-published authors; it’s also crucial for aspiring and soon-to-be authors. Your platform includes your Web presence, any public speaking you do, the classes you teach, the media contacts you’ve established, the articles you’ve published, and any other means you currently have for making your name and your future books known to a viable readership.

Your platform communicates your expertise to others concisely, quickly and decisively with clarity, confidence and ease. How visible are you? How much influence do you have? How many people know and trust you? If others recognize your expertise on a given topic or for a specific audience or both, then that is the measure of your platform success.

My question for you: Do you already have or have you ever had a platform on a particular topic? Please share your experience by commenting to this post. I’ll give some examples later. Right now I would rather hear about you.

Christina Katz is author of Get Known Before the Book Deal, Use Your Personal Strengths to Build an Author Platform and Writer Mama, How to Raise a Writing Career Alongside Your Kids. She started her platform “for fun” seven years ago and ended up on Good Morning America. She works on incremental writing career development with one hundred students a year and is the publisher of the e-zine Writers on the Rise. Christina blogs at www.thewritermama.wordpress.com, http://getknownbeforethebookdeal.typepad.com and http://writersontherise.wordpress.com.