While the short story or essay collection is a hard sell these days, the short story, essay, or article is an effective tool
for building an author platform.
Instead, the social medium is part of the long game of
building your author platform so you can engage with readers elsewhere and, eventually, possibly sell books to some of them.
For example, right now I help authors pick book names, choose an url for their website, and get them started
toward building an author platform and marketing their books.
You learn more
about building your author platform, setting up a blog, planning your promotion and publicity, dealing with the media, and promoting your book after it's published.
In this first post, I look at the process of planning the book, the importance
of building an author platform, and the basics of choosing something to write about.