Social Media Who? Here’s What Platform Actually Means for Writers

I am asked at virtually every talk, class, or dinner party I attend—and once, recently, at a funeral (don’t do that)—some version of the same question, usually with a slightly pained expression: Do I really need a platform to sell a nonfiction book?

(An Agent's Take on Tackling Queries.)

The honest answer is more complicated than any of us would like. (We’re talking nonfiction here because that’s a bit different—though there is fiction overlap if authors want to stick around.) But, to answer this question properly, we need to understand why platform matters and what it actually means—because it’s one of the most misunderstood, charged words in publishing today.

When agents and publishers require a platform, it can feel like gatekeeping—a way to hand the keys of the literary world to social media influencers and leave everyone else on the outside. But the real reason is because attention is now scattered across a thousand screens. Gone are the days of propping a book up in the Barnes & Noble window and watching it become a bestseller. Pair that with a glowing Times review and a couch spot on the Today show and you would have had a sure-fire hit—in 1998.

Since then, the world has gotten considerably noisier. Even the most powerful publishing marketing teams struggle to cut through the fray. Publishers need authors who can help carry the weight of a launch. It’s not a conspiracy, I promise. It’s math.

That’s where the idea of an author “platform” enters the chat. The publisher may be the machine, but the author has to be the heart.

Now, I find it helps to think of a book as a startup, and your debut as the launch of an entirely new branch of your career. A publisher is your investor and partner. Your proposal is your pitch. What you’re making a case for, in effect, is this: There is proof of concept here. There is a built-in audience hungry for this. And I am the person to deliver it.

That last part matters more than people realize. You’re not just making the case that the book should exist—you’re convincing them that you should be the one to write it, not only because of your credentials or perspective, but because you’ll show up as the CEO of this new part of your career. You’ll bring the events, the partnerships, the creative outreach, the relentless evangelism. You have ideas.

I do try to explain to editors that there are far fewer Harvard-educated, medical-journal-published, algorithmically obsessed, ring-light-ready neurobiologists—the kind who make discoveries that further humanity by day and live for making fun reels by night, while also finding time to write science-backed yet commercially hooky books—than they seem to expect. These are unicorns.

But that good news is that you don’t need to be one to write a fantastic book that sells. A smaller platform may mean a smaller deal, but it’s still a foot in the door. And that’s all you need to prove you’re a star.

For the authors we work with at the agency, we created an exercise called the Portrait of an Author, a series of focused questions designed to clarify your goals before you try to do everything at once and burn out. (Once you’ve sold your book and written it, you’ll typically have another year before its publication date to keep growing your platform and use it to bring readers to your book. Think of it as a marathon, not a sprint.)

The exercise begins with a two-line tagline—a clear, pitchable statement of who you are that you can keep repeating. Something like: I’m a former pro athlete who overcame a serious health crisis and rewrote the playbook for my life. Now I want to help others do the same. Or: I’m a stay-at-home mom who turned a passion for baking into a nationally recognized brand—starting with cookies sold from my minivan—and now I’m ready to share my secret recipes with my fanbase and beyond.

From there, we work through career comps (who you want to emulate and how they did it), and then I ask authors to write a “future bio”—a description of themselves filled with goals they hope to achieve, written as if they’ve already arrived. It’s a surprisingly powerful exercise. It forces clarity about where you’re actually trying to go, and that clarity shapes everything: whether you should start a podcast, launch a Substack, or pursue speaking engagements. Spoiler: You likely do not need to do all three.

Once you know your direction, I recommend treating platform-building the way you’d approach the gym: three times a week, at least 45 minutes, toward your specific goals. That time might go toward:

One author used the Portrait exercise and realized her Substack was dividing her attention without serving her actual goal: speaking and selling books. She shut it down, doubled her outreach to universities and companies, made a minimum book buy a requirement for every engagement, and tripled both within three months.

Another helpful development is that today’s publishers are not looking for the football-stadium-sized audiences they once were. They are looking for depth (think courses and newsletters, not likes and follows). They want to see that people are genuinely invested in you—invested enough to follow you from a short post into a 300-page book purchase. Publishing is not an eyeball business. It’s a trust business. And trust, built carefully over time, is something any author can develop.

Platform stops feeling like a burden the moment you reframe it from a requirement imposed on you to a natural extension of what you’re already doing—contributing to your field, sharing your message, finding the people who need to hear it.

Building a platform is not a distraction from your writing. It’s building the world around it. It’s growing a place for your book to land. And those who focus on connection over likes can mean the difference between one that fizzles and one that grows. Done right, your platform isn’t just the thing that sells your book—it’s the community that was waiting for it all along.

So go tell your story. The readers who need you are already out there. You just need to find them.