We talked yesterday about the role of editors in acquiring good writing and identifying writers with talent. Actually, according to a recent blog on Platform and Publishing by Scot McKnight, at least in the Christian publishing world, it is increasingly not the quality of your writing and your ideas, but how many people “follow” you on Twitter, Facebook, your blog and the like, as well as how many people go to your church if you are a pastor.
I should mention that this blog is not an effort to enhance my “platform”. If it was, I’ve got a long, long way to go. However it is interesting that one source from which I’ve received some free e-galleys of new books encourages you to create a profile with much the same criteria–your blog, numbers of friends on Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. I actually get this. You don’t want to give stuff away unless it will actually be reviewed and the reviews will be seen by a reasonable number of people with similar interests to the reviewer.
The problem with this platform thing in self-publishing is that the people who self-promote well are probably not the same people who produce the great works. In fact, I wonder if they might be more or less mutually exclusive categories. It would seem to me that many great writers are those who really give themselves to their craft, and building platform is a distraction of time and energy from what they are truly great at. Consequently, a book proposal from such a writer without platform may never get looked at.
The reality behind this is that book promotion is no longer the work of publishers by and large but by authors and those who will post reviews for them on Amazon. By the way, I don’t review on Amazon for this reason. I guess I would prefer to remain “independent”, write for my friends and those who are interested, and not do Amazon’s or the publisher’s work.
At the same time, the web and social media do provide a way that good authors can find readers. It appears that part of the trick is not so much building your own platform but rather identifying online bloggers and reviewers who have a platform of followers for the genre in which you write. This Huff Post article on The Shifting Landscape of Book Reviews chronicles the world of getting your book reviewed if you are an Indie writer. Now it seems, the challenge may be getting publishers to shift from looking at author “platforms” to looking at the reviewer response to their books. Of course, that presupposes that most new authors will publish independently and hope to get recognized.
That, I suspect is still a fairly perilous enterprise, but then I guess it always has been…
I wanted to make a side comment… Doesn’t Amazon own a portion of Goodreads?
When looking for the owner of Goodreads I found an article discussing new book review sites from last summer. This is something I will have to research more to see what sites are still available and how the business deal actually worked out. Here is a link to the first article I found.
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/retailing/article/57299-looking-for-the-next-goodreads.html
Interesting article. You are right about Goodreads and Amazon. As long as reviews don’t post to Amazon’s site, I don’t have a problem with Amazon owning them. And for those looking for books, they are not directed exclusively to Amazon. This could all change of course. And if Amazon takes over the site as a portal to its own commerce, it might lead to an even greater exodus. It would be interesting to look at the other sites mentioned in the article to compare features and following to Goodreads. Rosanna, any interest in researching this and doing a guest post?
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