As an author, having a strong platform is essential for reaching and engaging with your audience. An author platform serves as your professional presence, encompassing your online activities, social media, public appearances, and other interactions with readers.
It’s a lot, and building your author platform takes time and effort, but it can be the key to connecting with more readers and selling more books. Due to this, it’s important that you do your best to get your work out there, so in this article we'll explore effective strategies to help you grow your author platform and expand your reach.
1. Define your unique brand
Your author platform should reflect who you are as a writer and what makes your work unique. To start, think about what differentiates your books from others in your genre. Consider your writing style, themes, and personal interests. Even down to colours that would work with your style! This unique combination becomes your brand, which will guide how you present yourself to the world.
Create a consistent image: Develop a consistent visual identity across your online presence, including your website, social media profiles, and promotional materials. This helps readers recognise your brand at a glance. This comes from a combination of colours and fonts you use, the style and voice of your writing, and the types of content you share.
Craft your author bio: Write a compelling author bio that tells your story, emphasising your achievements, writing journey, and what readers can expect from your books. This bio will be useful for your website, book jackets, and other promotional materials. You’ll be amazed at how often you have to use it and send it out, so make sure you have it somewhere easy to access.
2. Build your author website
An author website is the central hub of your platform. It's where readers can learn more about you, your books, and upcoming events. As they say, social media is just rented space. You have no control over social media platforms. If it shuts down overnight, could your audience still find you? That’s why you need an author website: a space that’s yours to control.
Here's what to include on your website:
Home Page: Make a strong first impression with a visually appealing homepage that showcases your latest book and provides quick access to key sections.
About Page: Include your author bio and a professional photo. This is also a great place to share your writing journey and any personal anecdotes.
Books Page: List all your published books, along with purchase links and summaries. Consider adding a "coming soon" section for future releases or WIPs you have in the work.
Blog or News Section: Keep your website fresh by posting updates about your writing progress, book events, or personal stories that engage your audience. It’s also good to add posts that show your expertise, like reflections on the genre, your reading of other books, and knowledge pieces too if it fits your brand.
I recommend checking out several author websites of authors in your genre that you admire to see what inspiration you can take from them to use on your own website. How do they use colour or space, what do they write, what sections to they add, what layout do they have that you like or dislike?
And if you’re needing to chat to an author website pro, our approved partner Donika Mishineva is ready to provide expertise and support on author branding and websites.
Get in touch with her at her website, https://www.artofdonika.com/building-an-author-brand.
3. Leverage social media
Social media is a powerful tool for growing your author platform. It allows you to connect with readers and share your work with a global audience. I know many creators and writers can be quite introverted and worry about showing up on socials, but it’s a big miss if you’re not online. Here's how to make the most of it, from a creator’s perspective:
Make a page with an author name: Focus on the social media platforms where your target audience is most active. Instagram and TikTok are popular among fiction readers, while Twitter and LinkedIn are ideal for non-fiction. Twitter also has a massive writing community, which can be good for some if they want people to engage with. Facebook, while it seems it is on its way out, is still going strong, particularly in the case for groups. You can find writing groups and beta reading groups that work well on Facebook for writerly networking.
Post Regularly: Consistency, consistency, consistency. I bet people get tired of hearing this, but it’s true. Share a mix of content, including book teasers, behind-the-scenes insights, writing tips, and personal anecdotes. Don't forget to interact with your followers by responding to comments and messages.
Use Visuals: Images and videos are more likely to catch the eye. Share book covers, character illustrations, and short video clips to engage your audience visually. If you’re starting up, it can be hard to have pictures relevant to your book, so some use a mix of memes, books of the same genre they’re currently reading, book comparisons, and snippets of pictures of themselves as they work. Find what works for you.
But don’t expect socials to blow up overnight. It’s a slow process.
In a recent interview with author Brooke Martin that will be available for you all to check out soon, she said one thing she wished she knew earlier in her writing journey was to start her socials early, before her book was coming out.
It’s easy for writers to think they have to be ‘ready’ before they can go on socials, with a book nearly there and images of it you can show. But the earlier you go online the better, building your audience, sharing your work, and getting people used to your voice and style, already there to support you on the big day of your book release.
4. Collect email addresses
Collecting email addresses from people who visit your website is still a top recommendation and a direct way to connect with your audience. While many people think email might be dead with the rise of socials—you’re easy to access that way, after all—email is known to be the steady rock of the internet. It’s been steady through the rise and fall of so many different social media platforms, and is still the main communication method across most industries.
Authors and readers included.
And it doesn’t have to be challenging. You can also use different lead generation tools that are available online like Mailchimp and Squarespace among others. It allows you to share news about your books, upcoming events, and exclusive content direct to your audience.
To build an effective email list:
Offer incentives: Encourage readers to join your email list by offering a free ebook, a short story, or exclusive content. This increases the likelihood that people will sign up.
Tell people what they’re in for: What will they get out of signing up? People will want to know before they join what you’ll be sending them. After all, if what you’re sending doesn’t work for them, they won’t want to know. So tell them directly and they can decide if it’s for them.
Send regular updates: Keep your subscribers engaged by sending regular newsletters with news about your writing journey, book recommendations, and more. Be consistent but avoid overwhelming your audience with too many emails. You don’t want to sound like a human spam machine!
Personalise your content: Use the subscriber's name and tailor content to their interests. This creates a more personal connection and encourages readers to stay subscribed. There are ways you can automate this in many newsletter systems like MailChimp, so have an explore.
Finally, make it fun! People won’t want to receive the same boring content all the time. Add interesting elements like short stories, memes, polls, quizzes, free giveaways, links to music you wrote a certain scene to, cut scenes … there’s such a massive list of things you can do.
5. Connect with other authors and readers
Building relationships with other authors and engaging with readers is crucial for expanding your platform. Here are some ways to connect with others in the writing community:
Join writing groups: Participate in local or online writing groups. This helps you connect with other authors, share experiences, and learn from each other. As mentioned earlier, places like Twitter and Facebook are great for this. Join up, make make sure to follow their rules. For most groups, the rules are common sense: be respectful and don’t be a human spam.
Attend book events: Participate in book signings, literary festivals, and other events where you can meet readers in person. This builds credibility and allows you to interact directly with your audience. And these days, it doesn’t have to all be in person. There are so many great opportunities on online events.
Collaborate with other authors: Partner with other authors for cross-promotional activities, such as joint book launches, blog tours, or social media takeovers. This helps you tap into each other's audiences. Along with this, find authors as accountability partners. This helps you form a stronger bong and help keep each other motivated and creating in a world that can be quite lonely.
To build an author platform is a crucial step in growing your audience and achieving success as a writer. Following these five recommendations: defining your brand, creating a professional website, leveraging social media, building an email list, and connecting with other authors and readers will help you to establish a strong presence and reach more people with your work. The key is to be consistent, authentic, and open to engaging with your audience.
A phrase I saw recently that I loved and that applies really well here is:
To gain fans, you need to be a fan.
I think it sums this up so well. You need to put yourself out there, show up, interact with other writers, and celebrate their work too. Be real, and be a part of the community.
Good luck, and happy platform building!
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