Christina Katz continues her author platforms advice

20 Dual Questions About Your Author Platform

#2: Who Needs a Platform? / Do You Need a Platform?

By Christina Katz

Without a platform, your writing career is invisible. Since visibility for the right reasons is always good for your writing career, you really can’t afford to be an isolated, eccentric soul waiting for somebody else to make you famous. Those days are gone forever.

The opposite attitude is an attitude of responsibility. When you decide to launch a writing career, you won’t just be writing. That’s only part of the job description. You’ll also be responsible for coming up with saleable ideas, pitching your writing, and building a marketing platform that will promote your work. (And that’s putting the job description for “writer” in very simplistic terms. The multiple “hats” writers wear on a regular basis are described in more detail in Writer Mama.)

I’m sure we’ve all experienced our fair share of resistance, as writers, I’m sure. And thanks to the Internet, our job description gets lengthier every single day. But the upside of all of this is that the more responsibility you take for your career – including the willingness to develop your platform, the more ownership you’ll have, the more invested you’ll be, and the better you’ll be able to leverage what you’ve already accomplished.

Question #2: Who needs a platform?

All writers do.

Your platform is a way to assess and broadcast the success you’ve accomplished so far, which typically leads to even more success.

Long story short, the sooner you become willing to take 100% responsibility for your writing career, the more successful you will be in the short and the long runs. Once you’ve taken responsibility, you’ll come to realize that if a task isn’t on your to-do list, it won’t ever get done. And once you understand that all of the jobs that fall under the description “writing professional” are yours, you are ready for a lot more success than the writer who simply shrugs and says, “I’m not doing that.”

In the final analysis, platform development takes time and effort, but it leverages your worth. If you are a professional, it only makes sense to consistently and incrementally work on increasing your actual and perceived value.

Shrug at your professional peril.

My question for you: Do you need a platform? Do you want others to know about the value that you consistently offer? Please share your experience by commenting to this post.

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Christina Katz is author of Get Known Before the Book Deal, Use Your Personal Strengths to Build an Author Platform and Writer Mama, How to Raise a Writing Career Alongside Your Kids. She started her platform “for fun” seven years ago and ended up on Good Morning America. She works on incremental writing career development with one hundred students a year and is the publisher of the e-zine Writers on the Rise. Christina blogs at The Writer Mama Riffs,Get Known Before the Book Deal and Writers on the Rise.