That Thing I Never Should Have Done

On caring less about platform and more about craft

Portrait of a Man Writing in His Study by Gustave Caillebotte

For years and years now I’ve heard writers asking questions about how to get published. What can I do to impress an agent? What do I have to do to attract a publisher? With a hundred million billion trillion writers in the world, how do you stand out?

I remember wondering this question myself for the first time around 15 years ago as I began to write more consistently and got to know the industry a little more. And as I dug into the questions, one word in particular began showing up wherever I turned.

Platform.

For the uninitiated, an author’s platform is their ability to sell books based on their visibility in the world. In the last decade or so, this has been measured primarily by social media numbers—followers on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, along with readers of one’s blog or newsletter—but there are other measurements or ways of having a platform.

At first the importance of platform was mostly limited to writers of nonfiction, but in recent years it has crept into the consciousness of fiction writers as well.

This became the writer’s new obsession. How can I build my platform? Gain new followers? Increase my visibility?

For too many of us, it became our primary concern. We spent more time crafting posts and learning how to game the social media system than we did learning how to write better.

One of the biggest problems with platform building is that we keep building platforms even when the work for building platforms interferes with our time to create what we’re here to create in the first place. We’ve encouraged an entire generation of writers to care more about how many followers they have than about how to tell a good story, or create a character, or be specific, or escalate the story, or recognize what’s working in their manuscript and what’s not.

If many of us writers were honest, we’d look back on the last ten years of our lives and wonder what we were doing. Why did we spend so much time chasing a platform and so little time learning, practicing, failing, and trying again?

Recently, I saw a clip of Steve Martin where he said the following:

When people ask me, “How do you make it in show business?” I always tell them, I’ve said it many years, and nobody ever takes note of it, because it’s not the answer that they wanted to hear. What they want to hear is, “Here’s how you get an agent, here’s how you write a script, here’s how you…”

What I say is, “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” I just think if someone is thinking, “How can I be really good,” people are going to come to you. It’s much easier doing it that way than going to cocktail parties.

Be so good they can’t ignore you.

If you’re a writer, or a musician, or an entertainer, or an actor, or a photographer, or an artist, or an aspiring business person . . . what does that mean to you? How would you change the way you spend your time, if your goal was not to build a platform or an audience but to instead focus solely on the work, to be so good they can’t ignore you?

I set out eight or nine years ago to write ten novels in ten years, because I thought that, for me to gain the experience and learn how to write a great novel, I needed to practice, practice, practice.

That’s right, Allen Iverson. I’m talking about practice.

And I got off to a fast start. I wrote and published the following novels from around 2015 - 2020:

The Day the Angels Fell
The Edge of Over There
Light from Distant Stars
These Nameless Things
The Weight of Memory

But then my fiction-writing contract ended with my publisher, and I meandered along for a few years, aimless, not sure what I was going to do. I wrote (but haven’t yet published or revised) a few more novels . . .

A Murder Mystery
A Novel About Susan Pevensie
The Murder Mystery Sequel (about 20,000 words)
The first chapter of two other novels

But I felt myself, in the wake of recent writing rejections, being drawn back towards the platform side of things. Maybe if I had more Instagram followers…maybe if I got my Substack subscriptions up…maybe if etc etc etc.

But then I saw that clip of Steve Martin, and the following one with Matt Damon, where he realized he was going to have to make his own path and not wait for the gatekeepers to christen him a real actor.

“When Edward Norton got Primal Fear, we said there’s not another one of those that’s going to come around. We have to do our own thing…it wasn’t self-doubt, it was frustration at the system, because the system is not built for you to succeed. You have to break through it.”

These two clips have been living inside my head lately.

What does it mean to be so good they can’t ignore you? What does it look like to take the required steps to break through . . . on your own terms?

Maybe platform-building, at some level, is required. I’ve certainly made a lot of good writing friends there, and I landed a lot of freelance work through my online connections. I don’t know. What I do know is that I have so much improving to do right now in my writing and story-telling that I don’t really have much extra time to spend writing that perfect social media post or worrying about how many followers I have.

It’s time to get better.

What do you think about platform building?