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Passion Can Be Platform
Why you should forget follower count and focus on joy, instead
A while ago, a good friend and fellow writer, Curtis texted me. “Well, it’s happening,” he wrote. “They’re making me do PLATFORM.”
Curtis and I share a kick-ass editor at a major house, an intuitive woman who tries to let her writers concentrate on art instead of brand. But Curtis’ second book wasn’t getting the pre-pub attention that the publisher had hoped for, and they feared it was because Curtis was totally offline. Curtis was a standout humor writer, a very funny person! The time had come for him to Tweet.
Our editor held out for as long as she could against the marketing team’s decree. After all, Curtis was a productive writer with a long career in advertising who regularly published satirical pieces in hotshot publications. So what if he wasn’t on the socials? But the gavel had come down. Curtis needed to join both Instagram and Twitter to support his book. Like, now.
“I’m here because my publisher told me to be and I don’t know how to Tweet,” went Curtis’ first post. “Get ready for fun.”
“I’m on Instagram now because my book isn’t selling. Where’s the bar?”
As I watched Curtis leave digital skid marks behind his maiden posts, I imagined our publishers texting back and forth:
Omg this is a shit show, can one of the interns teach C how to tweet?
Did anyone tell Curtis that Instagram is image-based?
Can we get someone to maybe post for him?
Curtis joined social media in 2018. Four years later, he has 213 followers on Twitter and 637 followers on Instagram. Curtis doesn’t like social media and he isn’t especially good at it. So why was he forced on it?
Platform represents a person’s ability to reach the right audience for their product. Platform makes the most sense in the non-fiction market where you want to match your message with a target audience: a pescatarian cookbook with the pescatarian community, a sobriety memoir with the recently sober. The…
