The nudge to start building my second author platform
A shoutout to Jane Friedman. Her book The Business of Being a Writer gave me the final nudge I needed to start building my author platform for my upcoming debut novel, even though it’s probably a couple of years away from being published. In addition to joining Substack this weekend, I also joined Instagram and launched my website, chadswhite.com.
It sort of feels like when I had my second son—yes, it’s starting over and, yes, I know it will be hard, but I’ve done it before, so I’m confident I can do it again. In this case, my first son is my nonfiction book, Email Marketing Rules. For that book, which is in its fourth edition, I built a well-rounded website with a blog and newsletter, and grew my LinkedIn audience to more than 11,000 and my X/Twitter following to more than 17,000.
But building a platform for my novel means joining new communities and engaging in new ways. As of today, I have zero Substack subscribers and 3 Instagram followers, which means there’s lots of upside potential. Time to start making some new connections. I’m ready to learn. I’m ready to do this!
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