[Link] Building Your Author Platform in 10 Hours a Week (Including Writing Time!)

by Chris Robley

What is an author platform?

The “author platform” is a fancy buzzword folks in the book business use to talk about an author’s fan engagement, their social media and web presence, the size and dedication of their readership, and their connectedness to other authors, bloggers, critics, agents, publicists, publishers, etc.

By building your author platform BEFORE your next book launch, you’ll be able to harness the power of all those potential buyers, all those industry contacts, and your entire web community to increase your chances of success. After all, the only thing worse than not publishing your book is to publish it and get ignored entirely.

So how do you build your author platform?

One day at a time, of course. Just like writing, building an author platform is hard work; it takes daily dedication and organization. But the benefit of that labor is your writing will actually have an audience!

For the purposes of this article, I’m going to assume a few things about you (if any of these assumptions are incorrect, adjust accordingly):

• You are not a full-time author yet, but you’re building towards it (i.e. you still have a day job)
• You have other personal or family commitments that prevent you from spending every waking hour on your writing goal
• You are able to set aside 2 hours a day (M-F) for your writing and platform-building work

Only Monday to Friday? Well, at times the drudgery of this platform-building is gonna feel like a “real” job — so you deserve a weekend. If you can sneak in a few extra hours to write on Saturday or Sunday, that’s great, but leave the author platform stuff for the workweek.

Your weekly writing and platform-building schedule

A few notes before you start building your author platform...

Continue reading: http://blog.bookbaby.com/2013/01/building-your-author-platform-in-10-hours-a-week/