The Paradox of Platform

Most writers and editors I know, myself included, have quite the romantic idea of what publishing is like. We often see ourselves as valiant seekers desiring nothing more than to make the world a more beautiful place by creating, finding, or distributing the best writing. I do think that’s the ideal for virtually everyone in (or trying to break into) the publishing world. But I also know for a fact that, at the end of the day, publishing is a business, and no one wants to bankroll a book if they don’t have at least a reasonable suspicion it will sell. Hence the importance of a platform.

If you already have a built in fan-base from another venture, such as internet videos or a television show, your book will be a much easier sell than someone with no web presence, regardless of how good or bad either book actually is. As a person with virtually no platform, I know how that sounds—envious and a little bitter. To some extent it probably is, I confess, but it’s also just the reality of producing art for profit.

I wince every time I’m asked to include my number of twitter or instagram followers on a query, because I know how it looks to see that I have under 300 across both sites. That’s why I’m not writing to tell you how to grow your platform or reach more folks. Clearly I don’t really know how to increase my followers! And there’s plenty of resources available for that already, either way.

Instead, I want to talk about a conundrum I’ve realized I face. Hopefully it rings true for some of you, and we might all feel a little less alone in this journey. So let me be very transparent:

I do want to publish

All my friends and family know this about me. It’s not a surprise to anyone, I don’t think. 

I’ve been writing books since I was 4 when my mom would staple blue-lined primary paper between sheets of cardstock. In 3rd grade (and again in 5th) our English-Language-Arts class at school did a project that yielded a hardcover picture book, written (poorly) and illustrated (even poorlier) by me. In 7th grade, one of my best friends and I co-authored a cliché-riddled fantasy novel by passing a ratty notebook back and forth each day in the locker room before PE. Through high school and college I re-wrote that fantasy novel more than once.

I love to write, and I write mostly what I love to read. I write for myself. But… 

There’s a part of me (and every writer, I think) that longs for validation. It feels good—really damn good—when someone else reads something I wrote and responds positively to it. As an aspiring author, it’s hard not to assume that desire for validation would go away if I knew that an agent and then a publisher both read my work and thought “Wow, people will want to experience this!”

As a human, I know from experience that getting what you want never stops your brain from just wanting something else, something more. I think every American kid has sat surrounded by new stuff in a mound of crumpled wrapping paper and thought, that’s it? It’s over already? And I’m not foolish enough to really believe that publishing a book would change the fundamental flaws in my human nature. But I still think getting published would feel great. 

At the very least, I know for sure that anticipating getting published feels good. Next Tuesday, the 15th of March, is the date my kids book would have been released if the consequences of a series of stupid, selfish decisions hadn’t finally caught up with me last July. So this year, instead of being a step closer to the end goal of publishing, I’m at square one. 

Now, it feels like a major road-block to that goal is that I’m nobody of consequence. But there’s a problem even bigger than the fact that I don’t have a platform, and it’s not that my writing is bad. My bad writing is fixable with practice and good editing. No, the bigger problem is:

I don’t want a platform. 

There. I said it. I even made it a sub-heading so it would be big and unmissable. I worry that admitting this fact might be shooting dead my hopes of someday publishing, but it’s true. I don’t want to be famous. Sure, there are times I look at the seemingly glamorous lifestyles of the super rich and think, man, I wish I could have all that too. But I never really mean it. 

I don’t want 800 million strangers to dissect every stupid thought I’ve ever shared on Twitter and forgotten to delete. I don’t want to curate my content to get the most clicks and likes and views and shares. I don’t want to spend time learning how to game an algorithm that is learning so fast the engineers who created it no longer know exactly how it works. 

I don’t want my every action to be analyzed under a microscope until I’m dead. I don’t want to feel obligated to strangers to make what they want me to make if I don’t want to make it. I don’t want to be the subject of a “what ever happened to…” video or a “the rise and fall of…” podcast. 

And beyond all that, I don’t want to build a massive platform, then publish a book, then spend the rest of my career wondering if my book was a kinda-crappy manuscript that was chosen simply because it was sure to go gangbusters and pad the bottom line of a budget sheet.

I’m not totally sure what the takeaway is this week. Maybe there isn’t much of one. Or maybe it’s that writers are way too insecure. Either way, this is the abrupt ending to this week's post.