This guide covers pretty much all of the author platform topics, webmentions are enabled on all the pages of the guide. Therefore, I suggest to the community, that this could be the host.

This post is part of the (meta) discussion on the OpenMentions author platforms section.

One way to demonstrate platform reach to an agent or publisher is to demonstrate real-world reach. Many local newspapers accept freelance writers to help tell the news. Even ones that do not will often jump on a well-written press release.

Be it by press release or freelance writing, make a point of getting published in your local press. Add clippings or links to a page or section on your website. This will demonstrate that you have reach beyond a Twitter account and an Instagram account. Showing that you know how to reach the people where you live will increase agent or publisher confidence in your author platform.

There is no way to avoid the fact that, as an author today, you will need to learn the basics of marketing. Marketing is one of those things filled with arcane acronyms and weird jargon. That’s why we have a glossary of marketing terms to help you understand the language of selling online.

Book review blogs are a big deal. The most popular review sites have to charge to review book submissions if they even take them at all.

This is something you can leverage to get many book sales. Let me tell you how.

First, invest some time – several months at least. During that time publish good honest reviews of books you have been reading or have read in the last few years.

Second, when you have a good audience of readers following you, you are ready to go to step three. Like platform building as a whole, this step will take time.

Third, reach out to fellow authors with a reasonably sized following of their own. Offer them a simple swap – I will review your book if you review mine. Do this one at a time so you can keep up with the reviews.

This step gives you new books to read and review but also gets you a steady stream of reviews for your book. Encourage the reviewer to link to your page or subsite about your book as well as to your main website.

The links from those reviews will help readers to find you. Furthermore, links tend to raise you up the search results a little bit.

At the very least, each book review that your write will represent one sale to the other author.

Press releases are a whole new skill set for an author to learn. One way to learn faster is to subscribe to other author’s press releases.

You might discover a book you will enjoy but you will see enough examples of press releases to figure out what works.

Just drop some key sentences into Google to see if the press release became part of a blog or news story. The ones that do, keep in the “this works” pile. With the rest, try to identify what stopped it from working.

Congratulations, you are now on your way to becoming a press release expert. Who knows, maybe the next generation of authors will study your press releases for clues.