Author Platform

...not exactly what I had in mind. The platform I'm talking about is the foundation for an author's marketing. Now that you have created a brand (from last week's blog), you need to think about your author platform. Here is a list of what every basic author platform should have:

• a website 
• a blog 
• a Facebook Fan Page 
• a Twitter account 
• a G+ account 
• a Pinterest account 
• an Instagram account
• you can add others to this list, but these are the main pages all authors should be working with for branding and marketing. 

Branding and marketing are two separate things. We talked about branding in last week's blog; that's what you do to get your author name recognized. Marketing is what you do to get your product (your book) recognized and to generate sales of your product.

A couple of other things you can add to your platform--ways to promote your product to create interest and heighten sales--are a tagline and a logo. A tagline is a slogan that will help readers recognize you as the author and the kinds of books you write. For instance, racy romance author Jackie Collins, who is extremely well known in her genre, uses the tagline, "She'll keep you up all night."  But a reader who may not know who she is gets an idea of what her books are about by that little tagline on her website or book cover. 

A logo is a visual symbol that identifies your books. These are especially good when writing a series. Take a look at the Hidden Earth Series by Janet Beasley; she has a logo which tells you which of her books belong to that series by putting the same logo on every cover (you can see it at the top of the two latest books in the series): 

Remember, your books aren't going to sell themselves until you are a well known author, so it's up to you to do the necessary marketing to make that happen. Now get to work on creating that all-too-important platform so you can become an author whose name is familiar each time readers hear or see it.

Author Brand

Being an author means you need to create a brand for yourself. No, not DOUBLE R-BAR, or LAZY W, but the idea is exactly the same. Your author brand is your name or pen name. It is used primarily to promote sales of your books once your brand has become familiar among readers.

Take a well-known product; how about Dodge Ram? We all know certain things about it when we hear the name. For instance, we know it's a truck. We know it has a ram's head as its logo. We know that logo appears on the front of every Dodge Ram truck. We figure it must be a pretty good truck because they do a lot advertising, enough in fact, that its name has become common. That's the same thing you want to achieve as an author. People, in general, feel that exposure equals quality. So if you can accomplish exposing your name--your brand--in enough places, you'ill most likely be considered an author whose books are worth purchasing.

As an example, let's consider author Mark Twain--that's his brand. His real name was Samuel Clemens; Mark Twain was his pen name, and that was the name that gave him his brand. People became familiar with his brand and began to trust that it indicated something good (or something bad if it had happened to obtain a bad reputation. Don't let that happen). In the case of Mark Twain, familiarity with the name meant purchasers could depend on having a good read when they chose to buy his books. That's exactly what you want to happen.

 If your name is John Smith (a perfectly good name, by the way, but rather common) you might want to consider a pen name so it will grab people's attention. PLEASE don't skate on the name of another famous writer, however. In other words, if your name is John Steinbeck, don't promote yourself by that name; choose a pen name. It will actually do you more harm than good to try and make readers think you are the famous author instead of yourself just to sell books. After all, you have your own style, and that needs to shine through. And who knows...you might actually become a more prosperous author than he was!