Platform

Forgetting Your First Love

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At a luncheon yesterday, I was reminded by a speaker of the pitfall of forgetting our first love. In his case, he was talking about the life of research faculty, most of whom began their work out of curiosity to understand the way the world worked and their love of study. Along the way, there are many aspects of their lives that easily can supplant that first love–tenure and promotion, seeking grants and funding, awards and recognitions, and citations of one’s work.

It seems that there is a temptation to this in just about any pursuit. I’ve discovered that is even true of blogging! I got into this about six months ago at the encouragement of a few friends who appreciated some of the reviews of books and other writing I had posted on other sites. And I’ve discovered in the process a love for writing and expression in this form that I don’t think I had been fully aware of. Part of this comes back to why I am such a bookish person–I love living at the intersection of the love of God and love of learning and encouraging others in the discovery of the intersection of these two. And I love sharing my own reflections, however poorly crafted, on books, reading and life.

Along the way, I’ve discovered that there are temptations in the blog world to stray from this first love, just as there are in other pursuits. Some of these for me:

1. The dangers of paying too much attention to your stats. It is fascinating to watch how many views a post gets, how many are following your blog, which posts attract the most attention, get re-blogged or receive “pingbacks”.

2. That leads to the temptation of writing your post thinking more about attracting “views” than for what you really want to say. I’ve found myself saying, I wonder if it is a good idea to write about… because it probably won’t get many views.

3. It also means thinking about what citizenship in the blogging community looks like. I’ve heard it said that you should comment on other blogs to build following. I’d hope people comment on my blog because something I’ve written genuinely engages them. It only seems just that I do the same.

4. It is really tempting to get into “platform building” even if you aren’t trying to publish a book. For this blog, one of the temptations is getting free books for review. After all, who doesn’t love free books! The crazy part of this is that pretty soon, this thing can move from simply talking about what I love about books, reading, and life to obsessing how to get, and then how to find time to read and review those books.

The speaker I heard talked about the idea that the best place is probably one of tension. And I suspect this makes sense here as well. No one pursues any artistic endeavor simply to stick it in a drawer, a closet or to conceal it in your own studio. We blog not only as self-expression but to engage a wider community around the things we love which means both focusing on our love, and thinking about the world we want to engage. But it seems vital to do so in a way where we never compromise the love that got us into this in the first place.

One thought I’ve had is that perhaps my Lenten fast this year might be a fast from looking at my stats. I wonder how those of you who have done this longer than I deal with the things that can distract from your first love.

 

What Do You Get When You Combine Publisher and Platform?

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Last month, I blogged about the increasing importance of platform to one’s chances of getting published. What I didn’t consider was what you get when the lines blur between platform and publishing, as arguably is the case with something like The Huffington Post (a kind of Mecca for bloggers). What you get, according to Jonathan Sulia, cited in a post by Matthew Ingram, are “platishers”–a publisher of content which also serves as a platform for individual writers.

Ingram mentions many others who have gone this route including Forbes, Medium, and LinkIn. On each of these, they solicit and pay for some content while allowing anyone to post.  The big issue, it appears is not that some get paid for this, which is great (and the others get a portal to attract an audience at no cost). It is rather the lack of transparency distinguishing between paid and unsolicited content contributors. There is also an issue that some platforms, like Facebook may remove content without the provider even knowing it or knowing why.

All this suggests to me that we are in a new kind of “wild west” of publishing. The enterprising writer has a variety of new ways to establish platform, and even be published without working with a traditional publisher. And the reader has a variety of new ways to discover fresh voices, if they are willing to sift through the mediocre or outright bad.

Publishing Trends: Platform and Publishing

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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…