Pondering Author Platform
Guest bloggery: While one of Angela's personalities is arguing with Evil Monkey about who pays for the coffee, another other part is over here, hopefully posting something useful ... other personalities are variously conducting a shoe-shine business in New Orleans, drinking coffee in Melbourne and complaining about the weather, and planning a jewellery heist in Paris (wherein I will ultimately be caught due to the permanent nose print I left on the glass surrounding the French Crown jewels) ...I work in a writers centre dealing on a daily basis with - surprise - writers. Some days are great: people have intelligent questions, take advice, succeed. Other days, I feel like I'm chasing my tail, talking to myself, being punished by The Universe ... and I start to think 'If I smack my head against the wall hard enough, it will all go away.' One of the things I see a lot is writers madly self-promoting ... without having written so much as a word on a cocktail napkin or published even a short story or an opinion piece. Oh, they have 'platform' - but then, so do many of my shoes - but they have no product. And the fact that this is a problem seems to escape many of them.And so, may I present a repost of Pondering, something I wrote last February when my brain was 'sploding ...… the idea of self-promotion, something with which a lot of writers are quite uncomfortable.I’ve just finished writing an article for the next edition of the Australian Writer’s Marketplace on finding a literary agent … one of the points I put in there was ‘Write first, agent second’.‘Splain?Sure.If you’re approaching a literary agent, you need to have a product to offer her/him. The agent is running a business, the business of selling your book to a publisher, who then sells the book to readers … and the happy outcome of all this is an income for everyone. Huzzah, puddings for all. Yet I still receive queries at least once a week from people who say ‘I’ve been thinking about writing and I need a literary agent.’Well, why? You have no product to present. You got nuthin’, buddy. So, write first, agent second. And trying to find an agent in Australia? There are about 20 operating ... count 'em, 20. You really need to be able to make yourself stand out.Similarly, I’m getting a bit perplexed by newbie writers who are creating webpages for themselves, stalking other writers on FB and the like in order to ‘promote’ themselves … when they have no writing. No publications out there for a reader to go and look at … some post their writing on the site and that’s fine … but those who don’t have anything there but are madly promoting themselves are a puzzle to me.You need to have a product. You need to build a reputation based on your writing. If you’re a Mafia-hitman-in-training, then surely your resume should have some instances of actually putting horse heads in beds, rather than simply saying “I totally want to be a Mafia hitman and put horse heads in people’s beds, Mr Gotti.†Surely one must show a record of achievement.Otherwise, where’s the substance of you as a writer? You’re just Paris Hilton, all surface, all self-pimping, no depth, no achievement. Why bother?