The bestselling writers aren’t necessarily the world’s best writers. They certainly aren’t the ones with the best ideas or innate talent.
Like most new writers, I made the mistake of thinking that a successful writing career is about finding the right niche and having strong writing skills.
These things help, but the world’s most successful writers aren’t stuck in a genre. And many of them weren’t that good, to begin with.
What makes authors like Stephen King or J.K. Rowling popular is that they understand what matters. The same goes for popular bloggers like Seth Godin and Ramit Sethi.
An effective writer understands that writing isn’t just about finding the right niche and strong writing skills but about building a platform.
An author’s platform.
It took me a lot of time to finally understand what an author’s platform is.
Authorpreneur Journey Step 12
What is an author’s platform?
It’s people—the people you influence with your writing.
A platform is confidence that when you speak, there are people who will listen.
Many writers don’t understand having a blog, a newsletter, and a regular social media presence is all part of the process of going from aspiring writer to published author.
Moving toward becoming a professional writer cannot be detached from the idea of platform building. New writers need to do a better job of building their platforms.
Identify what you want to write about, build the discipline to write regularly, and you will have people who will connect with your ideas and style. It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen. You will build your platform eventually.
You will have to stick with the process.
And this is the only roadmap to becoming an authorpreneur.
Blogger -> Published Author -> Full-time writer -> Authorpreneur.
Your homework this week:
Build a routine and frequency to publish and start building your audience.
Writing Industry News
Sonantic has figured out how to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to turn written words into spoken dialogue in a script, and it can infuse those words with the proper emotion.
Although this technical advancement is done for the gaming industry, it will benefit the audiobook industry as well. The AI can provide true emotional depth to the words, conveying complex human emotions from fear and sadness to joy and surprise.The breakthrough advancement revolutionizes audio engineering capabilities for gaming and film studios, culminating in hyper-realistic, emotionally expressive, and controllable artificial voices [Venture Beat].
The first traditional publisher has produced an AI-narrated audiobook with Google Play's beta program. Richard Charkin wrote, “We’ve launched three titles as auto-narrated audiobooks under our own imprint on Google Play as part of an early beta trial…The technology has surpassed my expectations… You can sample these, free of charge: Churchill’s Few, Why Sex Doesn’t Matter, Getting Old: Deal With It.”
The audio sales are increasing rapidly, with that the number of books available as audiobooks. The pandemic has accelerated the trend. Just about every general book publisher is boasting record audiobook sales.
What Am I Up to?
The Five Pillars of Authorpreneurship article series is complete. Here are free links to all five articles.
Five Pillars Of Authropreneurship (Part 1),
Five Pillars Of Authropreneurship (Part 2),
Five Pillars Of Authropreneurship (Part 3),
In one of my previous newsletters Slow Down And Have Fun With Social Media, I wrote about accepting a 100-day challenge of posting something on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Today is day 61 of that. In two months, my follower numbers have grown to 490+ on LinkedIn, 250+ on Facebook, and 98 on Instagram. The experience taught me a lot about growing organically. I have also noticed that most writers have no idea how to use social media, particularly LinkedIn, to grow their brand. I am putting together a course, “LinkedIn For Writers.” to be held in mid-April via webinar. Watch out for that in the upcoming newsletter.
What Intrigued Me This Week?
I was listening to Steven Pressfield’s interview in The Creative Penn podcast. If you don’t know who Steven Pressfield is, he is the internationally bestselling author of books - The War of Art, Turning Pro, and The Lion’s Gate, as well as novels including The Legend of Bagger Vance, Gates of Fire, and Killing Rommel.
He said that he was learning to market his own books because he didn’t want another one of his books to vanish without a trace. He said he is not a great promoter of his own stuff, didn’t want to do it until he realized, ‘My career is over if I can't solve this.'
That intrigued me.
If a well-known and well-respected author like Steven Pressfield’s books can vanish without a trace, what about new writers like us. Even he is finding that he has to learn marketing. His acumen comforts me. I am not wasting time learning and teaching marketing.
And that is why we all need a platform.
We need a consistent way to stay in touch with the people who like our writing and want more of it.
If we can’t escape self-promotion, why not accept it and turn it into an art form.
And this is what I teach here in this newsletter.
That’s it from me this week.
Take care.
Looking forward to the webinar on how to use LinkedIn as a writer. Great Newsletter as usual.