March Magazine: Wow, That Struck a Chord!
Yes, we have a title for the 2025 book and I LOVE it! I also have lots of recommendations for you as well as my new piece of writing advice: "remember the spider"!
Wow, last week’s post about quitting social media really struck a chord with a lot of you. I received so many emails, aside from all the comments on the post itself. A lot of the emails were from authors and it made me realise I didn’t go quite far enough in discussing the much used phrase “author platform”. So here are a few more thoughts before we dive into March’s magazine.
For most fiction authors, the things you generally hear about author platform are a lie. Certain types of non fiction and books from influencers will absolutely benefit from the author having a strong social media presence. But for the rest of us, lots of followers on Instagram rarely correlates to lots of people buying your book. Unfortunately, there are lots of courses and articles out there that try to tell you something different. The thing is, I rarely see a hugely bestselling author with a commensurately enormous social media following teaching one of those courses or writing one of those articles. And the reason is; they’re too busy writing their next book!
I always say in the courses I teach that the main benefit of platform is when you're pitching. If a publisher can see that you have a platform, they like it. But it won’t get you a deal. It’s a nice-to-have, not a must-have. In the very rare case that a publisher is tossing up between two novels within the same genre that they like equally, but only have the budget to take one on, it’s likely that they’ll choose the author who has the better platform. Beyond the pitch though, a platform is more of an act of generosity: it’s there to keep your readers up to date with what you're working on, to give them background information about your novel, glimpses of your life etc. It’s not a tool that influences sales in any meaningful way, if at all.
And it’s wonderful if you want to participate in that act of generosity. I have, for years. I’ve enjoyed sharing photographs of amazing pieces of historical fashion, stories about the forgotten women in history, updates on my writing. But algorithms are increasingly making it difficult to get those photographs and stories and updates into readers’ hands, which is why I’ve made the move to Substack.
All of which is to say, don’t feel bad if you’re an author who had stars in your eyes before your first book came out, if you were thinking it was going to sell in the thousands and that your Instagram followers would all come to your events and buy your book.