Author Platforms
The New York Observer has discovered platforms as they relate not only to writers, but writers of fiction. I’ve added a link on the sidebar to the article which quotes literary agents Richard Pine, Larry Kirschbaum among others as well as Jonathan Burnham at Harper-Collins. The consensus is that even novelists need a platform because as Nan Talese put it you have to compete to attract readers, they don’t wander into bookstores anymore predisposed to reading. Thus at all stages of acquisition the question is raised “what is the author’s platform?” Bear in mind that this is an issue primarily for the big NYC publishing houses and may be less important to smaller publishers, British, French or Australian publishers. Since most novelists would like to be published by a major house, it might be worth taking a look at what a platform is, and whether the underlying assumptions are accurate.
Nothing is going to alter the New York publishers core belief that the audience for books is shrinking. They have statistics to back that up, but more importantly, they believe it. They believe it the way you might believe that it always rains on weekends where you live and that the storm will pass with the dawn of Monday morning. Readers of books have dwindled down to a handful of hearty Luddites who cannot manage MP3s or play video games on their cell phone. The 72 million Baby Boomers, for instance, who grew up reading, read no more. Most of them are dead. You can’t market anything to the handful of survivors among the Boomers because, being middle-aged, they no longer shop. It is not clear what they do with their leisure time, or leisure suits, but they didn’t buy The Nanny Diaries so they don’t read. Across the globe these Boomer generations still ponder the significance of the books they once read, but are perhaps baffled by the import of Bergdorf Blondes. And, so, authors must have platform.
Even the experts can’t seem to agree what platform is, only that it must be had. Oprah has it. Anderson Cooper has it. Babe Ruth use to have it, but he lost it. I have platform and so do you. My final thought on the subject? Mind the moving platform and watch the closing doors. Step lively. Grab some platform.