Your Author Platform: What you need for book promoters

I promote authors and their books in my specific niche of women in aviation with a website, newsletter, YouTube channel, podcast, across social media, and by hosting in-person author events. Some authors make it easy for me. Others seem like they’re playing a game of hide-and-seek and I’m ‘it’. 

There are tons of articles out there filled with great advice about what you need, and how to build, your author platform.  I’m going to share how I navigate those platforms and how you can make promoting you and your book a pleasure for people like me who want to gush about your work on their websites, social media, blogs, or who are considering you for an interview or book event. 

Amazon.com

The first thing I do when I hear about a new book launch is add the book to my website’s bookshop. Since it’s an affiliate site, my first stop is Amazon. 

For traditionally and hybrid-published authors this is a no-brainer—your publisher will list your book for you. Some self-published authors decide for a variety of reasons to do all their distribution independently. If that’s you, you’re limiting your market and making things harder for me. 

I’ll download the book’s cover photo, copy and paste the book blurb and my affiliate link, add my own curated categories and tags for sorting on my site, and, voila, now your book is in my shop and available for visitors looking for books that feature women in aviation (or, for others’ sites, insert whatever niche you’re writing in.)

I will also visit your Amazon author page, follow you if most of your books match my niche, and pull your author photo and bio to add to my book listing. I highly recommend having an author page if your book is listed on Amazon.

Bookshop.org

My next stop is Bookshop.org.

For all of Amazon’s convenience, I still like to support my local independent book sellers and want to give my website visitors that option, too. Bookshop.org also rewards me with a significantly higher percentage on sales through my affiliate links (at no additional cost to the customer), so there’s even more incentive for me to promote book purchases through them. 

Author Website

Then I Google-search your name for a website. 

If you sell direct to customers, I’ll copy and paste a link to that page for my website listing as a purchase option. Many hybrid and self-published authors like to sell direct for the higher percentage cut they receive on sales, and/or they offer some fun branded packaging, extras, and/or freebies in their book deliveries. I’m here to support all of that.

The website becomes even more important when I’m prepping for an interview, writing a magazine review of the book, posting about the book and author on social media, or planning an author event. 

Here’s what I’m looking for: 

Author bio. 

I hope to find both short and long bios so I can plagiarize and tailor my summary to the appropriate length for the medium I’m working in. I love that some authors get creative with this and tell personal anecdotes, talk about their families, pets, and hobbies, because it conveys a sense of their personality BUT I also need the meat. What are your professional credentials, why are you writing and publishing books, and what are you and they about?

Having a bio on your website is your opportunity to control the narrative of what’s being said about you. If you don’t give it to me there, I’ll go dig it up elsewhere on the internet and what I find may not be what you’re hoping to project about yourself. 

A clean, high quality, professional, downloadable, copyright-free author photo. 

Not a selfie at the beach wearing a hat and glasses. Not a picture in your dark, cluttered kitchen with dirty dishes in the background. And, because in my branding I like to remove the background and just focus on you, not a picture of you through the windscreen of an aircraft—just you, looking your best. And looking your best sometime in the last five years, please. 

Here are some great examples with the before and after I remove the background:

If you want to include other fun photos related to your book and who you are, please do. These can complement my efforts, but that one clean photo is critical.

Next Stop: Social Media

I will stalk you everywhere I can find you, except on “X” because I lost interest in that platform, but I’m active on FB, Instagram, and sort of on LinkedIn and TikTok. For me to find you, you should have links to your social media presence on your website, and your handle(s) should be something easily identifiable and related either to you as an author (@your.name.author) or your book if you’re a one-hit wonder (@MyAwesomeLifeStory). 

If you’re on FB, make an author ‘Page’ so you can separate your personal profile and post publicly so I can share your posts. If you’re on Instagram make your author profile public so people can find you and so I can share your posts. And if you’re on LinkedIn and don’t want to connect directly to your hordes of fans with your professional profile, make a business page for your author brand. Make sure your profile picture either looks like your book or your author photo so I can quickly sift through all the variations of your name and find the right person.

If all of this seems basic, congratulations! Promoting you is a breeze.

If it feels daunting, you’ve got this! You wrote and published a book, so you can definitely handle this. A basic author website is one of the simplest and least expensive to create—an author friend recently built her site with WIX for under $200. And you don’t have to be on every social media platform if that’s not your thing. Just pick one and make it your focus, or, like me, make your posts for multiple platforms at once so you can reach multiple audiences.

If you’re active on any of these platforms, and you want me to share your good aviatrix book news, feel free to tag me @LiteraryAviatrix! Otherwise, I’ll get to you when the algorithms pop you up on my feed, and who knows when that might be.