"Knowable." "Discoverable." "Readable": Empowering new ways to think about platform.
Plus: how I built an IRL platform without an MFA.
Last week, industry truth teller
shared a graph tracking the platforms of agented debut novelists and—in direct contrast to what gatekeepers preach about the cruciality of online platforms—“online visibility” was but a hangnail in the pie chart:
It very well might be the mission of my life to help writers push back against the frankly outdated and unhelpful insistence that writers-who-want-to-be-authors must spend most of their creative output and energy building an online presence. It’s just not a helpful directive. In fact, it’s meaningless. “Get an article to go viral!” “Build an army on Substack!” “Start a podcast!” Okay, but…how do we do this? Why do we do this? Where is the data that such enormous extra labor works?
Having a presence online does matter if you want to break into publishing: I do think that is true. But equating “platform” with a given amount of followers does not publishing success, make. Today, I want to introduce three ways to think about platform that could result in joyful and impactful human relationships instead of an arranged marriage with your phone.
I’ll be using my direct lived experience to support these three perspectives because I took a circuitous, off-beat path to publishing that might be inspiring to some. I don’t have an MFA. I went to college but I didn’t study English there—I studied Comparative Literature and worked in French translation. I didn’t take a writing workshop until I was in my thirties. In my twenties, I lived in France and had no writing friends. I wrote alone, revised alone. I read books alone and discussed them with no one. I got an agent early in my twenties for a novel I’d written in my free time before work, but I did not get my first book deal until I was nearly 34. For someone who has published 5 books, I don’t actually have an impressive following on either Twitter or Instagram, and the community I’ve built on Substack occurred after the publication of my fifth book.
While I’m lucky that I broke into publishing before gatekeepers started insisting that new authors come with a zillion followers, I’ve been publishing long enough to tell you that a robust online following is a flawed way to judge whether someone deserves representation and a book deal. Being discoverable online is important—no doubt about that. But having followers for the body count is not only tacky and insipid: it might not lead to sales. If I’ve learned anything about having a vibrant author life, it’s more important to have “1000 true fans” than 10,000 bots.
On the topic of 1,000 true fans
Despite researching the answer, I’m not sure who first coined the concept of “1000 true fans” but the idea—at least in publishing applications—is that if you can reach a point in your career where there are 1,000 real people out there who will spend money on your books, drive out to your lectures, talk about your work to other people and basically exist online and IRL as your true supporters—than you can’t do much better than that. You can’t do much better than that, literally. At a certain point, it doesn’t matter if you have 10,000 or 30,000 followers or even more than that— unless you are Beyoncé or Taylor Swift or Michelle Obama—it’s going to be hard to gain more than 1000 true fans no matter how high your follower count climbs.
If you have an author friend with a big following, ask them how many pre-orders they sold for their last book. If the same friend has a substantial following here on Substack, ask how many subscribers pay for their content. The numbers will surprise you. The writer and comic book author
is consistently transparent about his free-to-paid conversion rate and—being the mensch that he is—shared via direct message that he has 44,764 free subscribers and 938 who pay. This right here, folks, is the “1000 true fans” adage in action. (Please consider subscribing to Russell’s newsletter, The Author Stack where he is delightful and delightfully lucid about growth strategies on Substack.)Earning yourself one thousand true fans is a meaningful, needle-moving accomplishment that will take hard work and time. But judging from my own experience, getting there requires:
1) Doing something that people can celebrate and follow.
2) Having human friends in the same industry you’re trying to break into.
The good news is that both these things are pleasurable pursuits that will net you quality content and quality friends. In the rest of this post, I’m going to show you how I built a true network of readers by tackling my knowability, discoverability, and readability year by year. Please put on your seatbelt for this stroll down memory lane.
#1 Gaining Knowability as a Writer (or: making human friends)
