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.