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Ants and Grasshoppers: Honest Advice for Authors

Books and Writing

grasshopperAuthor JA Konrath reminds us of the parable of the Ant and the Grasshopper in his very straightforward and honest advice for authors.

If your blog is only relevant to a few close friends, and your website is only a big advertisement for your writing, why should strangers bother visiting either, let alone link to you? Your main goal, if you want people to discover you, is to entertain and inform them. Your Internet presence isn’t about what you have to sell. It’s what you have to offer, usually for free.

What are you offering? What on your website will make a surfer stay for longer than ten minutes? What on your blog will make it relevant in five years? Just being a published writer isn’t enough. Nobody cares that you’re published. Nobody cares that you have a book for sale.

Knorath makes the point that writing a book is only the first of many steps to success, and goes on to give some very practical advice on promoting yourself as a brand, and building the increasingly important absolutely critical Author Platform we publishers keep talking about.

Guess what? Your three sample chapters and two paragraph author bio aren’t enough to keep the average surfer interested for more than a few minutes, if they even find your site.

The article wraps with great advice on spreading your brand online and in real life.  This is a recommended read for current writers and aspiring authors.

Photo credit Xave Ignacio

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  • mjh

    Chris-

    According to Konrath, et al., I don't pester you enough. (I'm supposed to fly to Indianapolis to meet you, even.) Of course, my choice of 'pester' reveals my problem with self-promotion. Old School: You're a busy executive. New School: You're a key cog in the in MJH Machine, to be enticed and entertained enough to tell all your friends about me. (Hint - hint.) Mind you, I'm not rejecting the advice of others -- I like learning new stuff and figuring out systems. Still, I'm not ready to twitter or slavishly respond to a Starbuck's icon on my iTouch. (Unless you need a writer for such.)

    peace,
    mjh

  • Hi Anne, as always I'm happy to see you here and engaged in the conversation.

    Your comments actually deserve a post to fully reply to, and in fact I'll try to do that shortly, but let me hit some of the highlights:

    1. All of the books you mention are first and foremost unique, well-written books that are a bit buzz-worthy by the nature of their topics and lend themselves to word of mouth marketing.

    2. Levitt was hardly just some economist before Freakonomics. He was very well known in economics circles for his crime studies in particular.

    3. Fooled by Randomness was initially a cult hit on Wall Street, and that's where Taleb just happened to have a lengthy career with several firms.

    4. Gladwell, as you mention, writes for the New Yorker.

    5. Ferriss built a successful platform specifically to promote his book, which he has detailed and I have mentioned on this blog.

    Is there any one thing that is the secret answer to these success stories? Of course not, but each one has a common ingredient and that is a platform on which the author can get the buzz ball rolling.

    Perhaps we need to discuss further what it means to have a platform. It’s really more network than platform - and a great topic for further discussion here on the blog.

    Thanks.

  • I totally agree tio the advice.
    The only reason why i go back to a blog is to learn some thing, to know something more general than about the author and his own work.

    His perspective about the world, current trends and his own valuable opinion about things.

  • That is good advice.

    I wonder, however, if the author platform is as critical as you say. When I peruse the bestsellers at Amazon, I've never heard of most of the authors. Maybe I'm not in their target market.

    Even for books that I am in the target market for, I usually haven't heard of the authors before buying their books. Freakonomics was written by just another economist. Before Fooled By Randomness, Taleb was just a smart, somewhat abrasive guy who understood probability. Malcolm Gladwell did write for The New Yorker, it's true... but that's not really a personal brand.

    And then there's Tim Ferriss. He didn't have a personal platform, just his knack for self promotion. I still don't see him as having a personal platform -- he's just written a successful book, but he's not really known for anything other than that.

    So where does personal platform show up as being critical, other than in getting a publisher to commit to you as an author, because it seems to reduce their risk?

    Sorry if this is coming across as cranky, I'm in the middle of edits you know, and criticism makes me cranky ;)

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