All authors need a platform, whether they’re as famous as JK Rowling or as new to the business as me. If Shakespeare were alive today he, too, would need a platform.  Believe it or not, he actually does have a platform, and even though he died more than four hundred years ago, his platform is way better than mine.

What is a platform you ask? Well, in its simplest terms it’s an author’s online, social media presence; his or her virtual cult of followers.  Agents, publishers, and pretty much everyone on the business end of book publishing research a new author’s social media presence before representing them to make sure they have a large following of potential book buyers.   That’s just the beginning.  They also expect authors to participate in the marketing and promotion of their books by incessantly reaching out to their online cult via tweets and posts in the hopes your posts will get retweeted, favorited, liked, and spread around the world like a digital pandemic.  It is a business after all, the business of selling books.

Here’s the thing. I can’t stand social media.  I prefer to live in real life and not online.  And while I know I’m not the only one who feels this way, I also know I am in the minority.  Everyone is on social media in this country, even little kids and yes, pets, too.  Social media has been weaved into the fabric of our society now.  You can’t hide from it.  I tried to hide and was actually very successful for many years.  But, then I decided I wanted to be a writer and I learned at my very first writer’s conference about the necessity of a platform built on a strong social media presence.  Everyone at the conference was so far ahead of me.  They had thousands of followers, their own websites, blogs, speaking engagements, guest appearances on other writers’ blogs, etc.  I had, well, I had zip, zero, nada.

I came home from that conference and pouted for a while, for like twenty minutes, and then I joined Twitter. I like Twitter.  It’s easy to connect with people, especially other authors, and I can be as active as I feel comfortable being on the site.  For example, if I can’t think of a unique and interesting string of 140 characters to send out into hyperspace I can simply cheat and retweet someone else’s genius.  It’s plagiarism, true, but retweeting is actually condoned as a way of paying a compliment to the person who originally sent out the tweet.  How convenient!

There is one problem with Twitter, though. When you’re on it and putting yourself out there for the whole world to see you end up casting a very wide net, which means you can, and often do, catch some unseemly fish in the process.  Everyone has access to you, like folks that think Twitter is just an alternative to Match.com.  I can’t believe the things complete strangers will send in a personal message. Enough said.

That etiquette fail aside, there is actually a simple rule to follow when building a cult of followers on Twitter: if someone follows you then you need to follow them back (unless you check out their page and see offensive material). Everyone is trying to build their social media platform, just like you.   Oh, a word of caution:  once I got on Twitter and had a few hundred followers under my belt I started to notice that people who followed me actually unfollowed me a few weeks (or sometimes hours) after they started following me.  I wondered why.  Did I offend them?  Was my Twitter activity so dull they had no choice but to dump me rather than be linked with me in this virtual world?   I turned to the experts to inquire (my teenage children), and while they did agree my tweets were about as exciting as my real-life communication with them, they explained that everyone wants to have a much higher number of followers than the number of people they’re following.  When the situation is reverse, they explained, people will know you’re a nobody.  I may be a nobody, but at least I’m not a Twitter troll.

Ouch. So many rules.  In the immortal words of Bob Dylan, “The times they are a changin’.”  You got that right Mr. Dylan.  P.S., congratulations on the Nobel Prize. It was much deserved.

Anyway, good luck with the platform building. I am certainly not an expert on this subject but I would very much like to connect with you on Twitter (@jackieranke19).  I promise I will follow you back!