I’ve been hearing a lot about the necessity of building a platform. Apparently before a publisher will pick up a first time writer’s book it not only has to be superbly written and perfectly timed for the market, but the author also has to have thousands of loyal fans ready to buy it. Seems like a tall order. How I am supposed to get those fans without having a book already published? Sure, authors like Neil Gaiman and Warren Ellis have huge followings on Twitter and the web, but they got them after they were published, not before.

If I’m writing non-fiction, I can start a blog about my topic. If, for example, I’m writing the true story of a stalwart band of heroes guarding Sumatran rhinos from poachers in the Bukit Barisan Selatan rainforest, I can blog about their exploits and my efforts to chronicle them and build a following that way. But what if I’m writing a novel set in the far future about an orphan lost on a space station the size of a city? Or my book is a romance between the hard-charging stock broker and the mild-mannered hedgehog farmer who loves her? How do I blog about that before it’s been published?

I asked that question of Southern California Writer’s Conference webmaster Jeremy Lee James and he had a pretty good answer for me. First, you don’t have to blog about your unpublished book. The point is not to sell the book to people who have no way of buying it (yet). The point is to create demand for you, the author, and eventually for your book. How do you do that? The keys, according to James, are voice and content. Develop your own voice and use it to say what has meaning for you, just as you do with your writing. Blog and tweet about topics you have a real passion for. If you love Sumatran rhinos, blog about rhinos. If you are deep into research into how cities are designed and built for your space station saga, blog about that. If you’re obsessed with how men and women communicate—or what happens when they don’t—and that’s what prompted you to write that romance, blog about that. Do it in your own voice and unique point of view, and you’ll have something of your own to offer people.

If you have short samples of your fiction you can post or link to, do that too. Giving potential readers a brief taste of your work can persuade them to look for it in the bookstore.

But what if you aren’t a blogger? Is there another way you can build a platform? According to Lynn Price, editorial director of Behler Publications, there is. Authors can develop expertise in subjects related to their book and arrange to speak to groups that care about that topic. As with blogs, this appears to be easier for non-fiction writers than fiction writers. For my mythical book on guarding Sumatran rhinos from poachers, I could speak to animal conservation groups, animal rights groups, Southeast Asian interest groups, the list goes on. But for my space station saga? I’d have to get a bit more creative.

Price suggests that fiction writers find a topic within their work that would be appealing to an audience. If I am already developing an expertise and interest in urban design and how it might apply to space station design, I could offer myself as a speaker to groups on those topics. (OK, that’s a bit of a stretch, but you get the idea.) The point is that blogging and Twittering is not the only way to build a platform.

Whatever way you choose to build that platform, starting sooner is better than later. It takes a long time to build an audience, and beginning when you sell your book to a publisher or when it hits the shelves puts you farther behind than you might realize. You’ll be in a better position to develop your relationship with your potential readers if you have already started to connect with them through the web or in person before your book is published.

How much time should you spend on platform building? That’s up to you. For me, writing my stories matters more than anything else. But I want to spend some time each week connecting with other people, writing on topics that matter to me, and developing my voice. I think all of that will make me a better writer. If it helps me develop my platform too, so much the better.

As daunting as the task of building a platform sounds, I’m relieved to have discovered that there’s a strategy out there for writers of fiction as well as non-fiction. Be true to your voice, write what you are passionate about, connect with people in person, and show your readers how great your stories are.  Don’t wait until you are published to begin; a head start is critical for building an audience. And most important: write. That’s what we’re all here to do.

I was at the Southern California Writer’s Conference last weekend and as always came back with some valuable ideas and connections.

At author Bob Yehling’s panel on Cross-Genre Writing, Yehling urged listeners to keep a stack of four to five books around and read them at the same time to improve the reader’s ability to use figurative language. Apparently the right/left brain connections built by this method help generate metaphors, similes and analogies.

Presently I’m reading Eight Lives Down: The Most Dangerous Job in the World in the Most Dangerous Place in the World, by Chris Hunter; The Land of Nod by Mark A. Clements, The Art of Subtext by Charles Baxter, and re-reading A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin. I’ve been reading more than one book at a time for a while now, motivated by a desire to cram as much into my time as possible. I’ve noticed that figurative language has been coming to me more easily but assumed it was just due to practice. But perhaps Yehling is onto something here, and it’s my daily cross-reading instead. Has anyone else been doing this and gotten similar, or different, results?