Martha Jewett's Free Tips for Business Book Authors

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Free Tips for Business Book Authors

What is Author Platform?

Author platform refers to the size of the built-in buying audience an author brings to the project. Author platform includes such things as:

Name recognition
Fame recognition
Business reputation
Institutional recognition
Company ranking (it is #1 in its category?)
CEO reputation
TV shows
TV appearances
Radio shows
National journalist covering a major story
National columnist (circulation)
Syndicated columnist (circulation)
Celebrity
Journalist covering celebrities
Size of speaker’s audience (number of speeches x number of attendees per year)
Sales of previous books
Number of clients who will purchase the book

Business book publishers view a platform as being necessary to launch books today and will assess whether to sign a book based on the size of the author’s platform.

There are several reasons for this.

Distracted Business People. It’s hard to entice consumers to notice and pay attention to books. Given the increase in the amount of “critical” business information, the opportunity cost of business people’s time has increased. Instant information leads busy business people to spend more time than prior generations with their Blackberries, cell phones, and laptops. Everybody says they are busier and people say they have trouble finding the time to read. I notice that very few of my friends read books except on vacation, although some listen to books on tape when they commute.

Glut of Books. Thousands of new books are published every year.

Decline in Traditional Media. Print and radio media, the traditional ways in which books have been promoted, are reaching smaller and smaller audiences.

Online Media. The online media are a mixed bag for books. The online stores such as Amazon.com and BN.com are significant distribution channels for business books. But digital and search technologies have the capacity to separate the content of books from the physical books themselves, which threatens traditional book publishers.

Celebrity-Driven Media. Because of economies of scale on both the supply and demand side and corporate consolidation, media is driven by celebrity. Celebrities attract audiences, which leads to celebrities getting larger shares of sales, deals, and revenues (“winner take all”). The celebrity economics, which is well established in media, also dominates business books (e.g., Jack Welch’s first book deal and Warren Buffett’s book deal).

Entrenched Publishers. Book publishers tend to be risk-averse. They focus on traditional technology—the printed book—which has been around since Gutenberg. Business book publishers needs books, but does is the book under threat?

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