If we could just build a writer’s platform with stuff from Home Depot, it’d be easier to accomplish even if you are like me and a fearful dolt with power tools.  

Easy or hard to accomplish, building a writer’s platform is essential if you want to succeed.  While you can’t buy the components even online, you can begin from the get-go of your writing career to work toward a solid one.  

Let’s define what a platform is, why you want one and how to get one.

A platform tells editors, publishers and/or potential ghostwriting clients three things about you.  It explains who you are and why you write.  It gives information about your professional background and finally it lists where you’ve been published, the books you’ve written, contests won, media attention, blog/twitter followers and other media connections.  It’s your place in the sun because it’s all about you.  

While mentoring a hopeful nonfiction book writer who had hired me to review a proposal before it went to an agent, I read her platform and how she would be on “Ellen” with her new book.  I stumbled on that promise.  I longed for it to be true.  Alas when I phoned her, her comment was, “I will simply ask to be on the TV program and they’ll let me.”  My response, “Ah, no.”  These days, facts can be checked so fabrications won’t cut it. 

Why build a platform?  It tells those in the industry what you’ve done and that your writing is marketable, otherwise you wouldn’t have publishing credits.  Editors are notoriously timid about hiring/using unproven writers, although they do or I wouldn’t be here or would any other writer who has been published.  While most editors and agents long to discover the newest and greatest unknown talent, they also like it better when writers have published credits and name recognition.

How in the heck do we get that, the published credits and name recognition?  Easy peasey?  Nope.  Doable?  You bet.

Regardless of your genre (category of writing) you will need to build a platform so you can continue to progress in your career.  Yes, I’m talking to you out there, you poets, screenwriters, novelists and essayists as well as nonfiction writers and ghostwriters.

The easiest way to do that is by writing queries and selling articles.  Note, the key word in that first sentence is “easiest” and not easy.  Learn to write queries which knock the socks of editors or supply the publication with interviews from experts or give information they crave.  Then be the writer who follows the publications’ guidelines.  Once the query is accepted, submit the article that has been promised before any deadline and stay business like.   It sounds like advice Grandma might have given but we have to show tenacity and be dependable. 

To write for magazines, start your search for marketable publications, not the glossy ones at the grocery store check out counter, but with local and regional ones.  Study who’s written the article, the length, the expert quotes used and the credentials of the writer.  Then be brave, submit a query that adheres to their submission guidelines.  If you’re asked to submit an article on spec, do your utmost to provide a professional article in a professional way. 

While I am not saying to do this more than a few times, if you must write for free to gather a few clips (published clippings of your writing) then do it.  

Once you’ve got those clips, you’ve got a strong start on your platform.  As you are doing this building continue to write in your preferred genre.  Short stories?  Submit to contest.  Poetry?  Find journals and opportunities to share your work?  Novels?  Keep working on them.

Here’s a good, older article on how to build a platform.  writersdigest.com/writing-articles/by-writing-goal/build-a-platform-start-blogging/building-a-writers-platform

There you have it.  Build it (your platform) and they will come (editors, agents, publishers and readers).

©Eva Shaw, 2002