By building your author platform before your next book launch, you can harness the power of potential buyers, industry contacts, and your entire web community.

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 goals

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:

If you’re waking up early before work to get in your 2 hours, I’d say start by writing — that way if you’re in the flow, you can always keep going. If you’re doing your 2 hours after work, you might want to “wind-down” with the platform stuff; then do the writing afterwards once you’ve de-stressed.

I always thinks it’s smart to choose 2 social media sites to concentrate on at first. I’m using Twitter and Facebook for this example, but you could substitute with Pinterest, G+, etc.

Reading is something we’re hopefully doing all the time. But you gotta find time outside of these 2 hours for that!

Keep things flexible. You might end up spending an extra 20 minutes on your interview responses one day, which cuts into time to submit work for publication. Oh well. You’ll get back on schedule the next day!

Week 1

Monday

60 minutes: writing

30 minutes: revision

30 minutes: schedule tweets and Facebook updates for the week

Tuesday

60 minutes: writing

30 minutes: revision

10 minutes: respond to social media comments

20 minutes: prepare 2 submissions

Wednesday

60 minutes: writing

30 minutes: revision

20 minutes: interact with book forums, book-recommendation engines, GoodReads, etc.

10 minutes: respond to social media comments

Thursday

Friday

60 minutes: writing

30 minutes: write a guest post for another blog

10 minutes: respond to social media comments

20 minutes: website maintenance (updates, respond to blog comments, etc.)

Week 2

Monday

60 minutes: writing

30 minutes: revision

30 minutes: schedule tweets and Facebook updates

Tuesday

60 minutes: writing

30 minutes: book distribution maintenance, Amazon Author Central profile, accounting, etc.

10 minutes: respond to social media comments

20 minutes: start writing the copy for your monthly email newsletter

Wednesday

60 minutes: writing

15 minutes: revision

15 minutes: review newsletter copy and email it to your list!

20 minutes: interact with book forums/book-recommendation engines, GoodReads, etc.

10 minutes: respond to social media comments

Thursday

60 minutes: writing

30 minutes: prepare for your reading (press release, logistics, etc.)

10 minutes: respond to social media comments

20 minutes: seek out guest blog opportunities

Friday

60 minutes: writing

30 minutes: write a blog for your own website

10 minutes: respond to social media comments

20 minutes: update website (make sure your website is media-friendly)

Week 3

Monday

60 minutes: do an interview (by email, phone, or in-person) for a blog, podcast, TV show, radio, etc.

30 minutes: calm your nerves from the interview — drive back home

30 minutes: schedule tweets and Facebook updates

Tuesday

60 minutes: writing

30 minutes: revision

10 minutes: respond to social media comments

20 minutes: prepare 2 submissions

Wednesday

60 minutes: writing

30 minutes: revision

20 minutes: interact with book forums/book-recommendation engines, GoodReads, etc.

10 minutes: respond to social media comments

Thursday

Friday

60 minutes: writing

30 minutes: join or maintain relationship with online writing group, author association, or sign up for a writing conference

10 minutes: respond to social media comments

20 minutes: website maintenance (make sure your blog looks pro)

Week 4

Monday

60 minutes: writing

30 minutes: revision

30 minutes: schedule tweets and Facebook updates

Tuesday

60 minutes: writing

30 minutes: revision

10 minutes: respond to social media comments

20 minutes: prepare for your reading — which is coming up on Thursday!

Wednesday

60 minutes: writing

40 minutes: do a dress rehearsal for your reading

10: make sure everything is set for the reading

10 minutes: respond to social media comments

Thursday Night

120 minutes: give a great reading! (Oh, and be sure to get it on video)

Friday

60 minutes: edit the video from the night before

30 minutes: post the video on your blog, YouTube, and share on social networks

10 minutes: respond to social media comments

20 minutes: WILD CARD! (do whatever you didn’t have time for earlier in the month)

This is just an example of one way to do it, but I’d love to hear from you: does this schedule look anything like your daily writing and platform-building routine? How have you started building your platform as an author? What’s worked? What’s been a waste of time? Let us know in the comments section below.

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