What is Author Platform, Really?

PETERMBALL GenrePunk Ninja, Rethinking Author Platform in 2025

I recently offered GenrePunk Ninja subscribers a list of options for a series of deep dive entries, and got them to vote on which they were interested. The two winners where “how do we do author platform in 2025” and “what can fiction publishers learn from comic books”, so I’ll be doing a short series on both here over the next month or so.

What is Author Platform, Really?

THE SOCIAL MEDIA CONUNDRUM

I’ve been making some strategic changes in my writing and publishing businesses of late, and the biggest of them is “get very bad at social media with fierce intention.”

Facebook and its ilk have always presented a conundrum on the writing front: I don’t enjoy being on social media, but I do enjoy having an audience. How do I find the latter if I don’t make use of the former?

I’m not alone in this. Many creators have felt it, and the conversations are growing louder in creative circles. For instance:

  • Hank Green has been questioning the value of social media that devalues links off-site.
  • Cory Doctorow coined the word of 2024—enshittification—in his essay describing the decay phase of a platform where user experience gives way to monetization.
  • Direct sales became a hot topic among indie publishers eager to escape the hegemony of Amazon, especially as organic discovery is replaced by pay-per-click advertising on the platform.

My own relationship with social media hasn’t been the same since reading Mike Monteiro’s Ruined By Design, where he captured the business model of Twitter as “Twitter makes money by getting you to fight with Nazis” (115). I’m all for fighting nazis, but making money by forcing people to do it seemed stupid (and an accurate description of being on Twitter at the time), so I stopped using Twitter.

Things have come to a head with the fallout of the most recent US election, which saw companies like Meta abandon active moderation of their platforms. It took 12 hours for my Instagram feed to transform into something abhorrent.

I deleted the app off my phone after being shown a reel of a dog crapping in someone’s mouth. The cost-to-benefit of staying on the platform no longer worked for me. It seems to have clamed in the weeks since, but I’m wary.

Meanwhile Threads—which I spent so much time on talking writing in January 2024 it turned into a book—is now a place that shows me engagement bait designed to make me angry.

Twitter/X had been dead to me for a while, and nothing I see about the platform has convinced me I was wrong.

Yet much as I’d love to quit these platforms altogether, I keep my foot in because that’s the business I’m in. Social media sites are places where potential readers gather, so in theory it behoves me to be present on the network.

After all, aren’t writers meant to have a “platform” to sell their work?

THE RISE OF “AUTHOR PLATFORM”

It’s worth considering where all the advice around social media and writing really originated.

In the nineties nobody placed any real emphasis on fiction authors building a platform. In 2025, it seems impossible to think about publishing a book without considering it.

The notion that fiction authors ‘needed a platform’ picked up speed in the early 2000s, when the first wave of successful authors emerged with huge audiences built on Blogs or platforms like MySpace.

The publishing industry was ecstatic. “These people are best-sellers with minimal marketing costs! This is amazing.”

And so the cycle began, often misunderstanding why these first wave writers were successful.

“You need a blog,” authors were told, and so they set up blogs even if they had no interest in them. A few early posts would slow to a trickle, then become an intermittent cycle of “I know I haven’t blogged for a while, but…”

Some authors actively resented the process, making it clear they’d only done this because their agent/publisher said they had too. Oddly, those blogs rarely took off.

At the same time, enough people blogged with enthusiasm that they built platforms, perpetuating the notion that blogs were important.

The publishing industry—always eager to embrace anything which will sell books and create buzz—dove into the internet headfirst.

Then indie publishers—working faster and leaner than their traditional counterparts, embraced social media tools and the one-to-one connection with their readers and become an industry-wide phenomenon.

And the idea of “author platform” was born, becoming a hot topic for the last two decades with very little real interrogation of what’s really going on.

THE ERA OF DWINDLING RETURNS

The first sin of author platform was always failing to understand that some people are a natural fit for some modes of engagement. Platforms advice became one size fits all. Author X sold a huge number of books by blogging or talking on TikTok, ergo authors Y and Z should do the same thing.

This failed to take into account two things. The first is the skills of the author in question, and how well they fit a particular platform.

Perhaps the writer had a natural flair for witty bon mottes, for example, which made them idea for Twitter. Or they were incredibly personable and held great conversations, which is ideal for podcasting.

The second thing was timing.

Over the last two decades I’ve lived through multiple waves of platformm advice. As blogging faded in popularity the cycle of replacement platforms began: Facebook, Twitter, Podcasts, Newsletters, Google Plus, Telegram, Instagram, TikTok, Circles, Patreon, Substack, and so on and so on and so on.

And, again, some people excelled at those places. They built a platform and sold books.

Other people sunk time and effort into them for minimal effects.

And every time, there was a real misunderstanding of how and why these platforms worked.

Here’s a key detail many people miss: the best time to leverage a social media platform is while it’s new and building audience. Once it’s established–and often by the time people start offering coures on how to use it–the platform is past that moment.

See, new platforms need to build user numbers fast, often with an eye to paying back venture funding. This means they give away the thing that connect creators value—reach and attention—for free, in exchange for content that makes using the platform valuable.

And if platforms stayed that way, everything would be rosy.

But that’s not how capitalism works, and sooner or later a platform needs to pay their venture funding back.

MEMORIZE THIS WORD “ENSHITTIFICATON”

Sci-Fi writer and internet commentator Cory Doctrow caused a small phenomenon when he introduced the word “enshittifiation” to the lexicon in 2024. In five syllables, he crystallised the frustration many writers felt with maintaining a platform.

If you haven’t read his primary essayon the topic, you really should. I’d argue it’s among hte most important things writers can read here in 2025.

For those resistant to outside reading, the core of Doctorow’s argument is simple: when a new platform launches, they want users, so if you’re providing content and drawing attention to their platform they’ll show you to more and more users.

Eventually the platform reaches a critical mass and starts needing to earn money back. This is when the user experience begins to decay, and the decay happens increasingly sharply as things go on.

Because here’s the thing: social media platforms trade in data and attention. They have an audience whose attention you want to capture. While they’re willing to show things to that audience for free while building to a critical mass, now they want to charge people for it.

So things get…shittier. Your posts reach slightly fewer people unless you’re willing to pay for a boost. Your followers don’t see everything you post unless you’re a paid member, or willing to run ads.

Soon the platform you used to get for free is going to cost you an arm and a leg if you want to reach your audience, or it easts up more time as you optimise your organic reach.

Either way, it costs you money to find the readers you used to connect with for free.

Yet authors–especially newer authors–cling to the idea that being on social media is essential in order to sell books.

WHAT AUTHOR PLATFORM REALLY IS

For my money, the most insightful definition anyone has offered about Author Platform was Jane Friedman’s 2012 definition: an ability to sell books because of who you are or who you can reach (A Definition of Author Platform).

Friedman’s essay has been updated a few times since it was first written, with a stronger focus on non-fiction where a “strong platform” is more essential, but the principles she lays out are incredibly useful for fiction writers.

Platforms emerge from a strong body of work distributed through outlets and mediums you want to be identified with and your target audience reads.

The definition is social media agnostic. In fact, you can apply it to any number of tools, but the actual metric is important: how many people can you reach? how can you compel them to take action and buy books?

If you haven’t covered both, then your platform is going to keel over. If you’re reliant on a social media platform in order to reach your audience, then you should expect to earn less and less over time as the cost of reaching your audience grows.

Social media can be a useful part of your author platform, but if it cannot sell books, then what the hell is investing time there?

EXPANDING YOUR PERSPECTIVE

Fortunately, Friedman’s definition offers some useful ways of stepping away from platforms. While it’s natural to default to social media options, there’s actually all sorts of things writers can do to increase their reach.

Writing short stories and submitting them to major magazines in your genre is totally a platform building activity.

Going to conventions and events to meet readers where they gather is a platform building activity.

Writing non-fiction articles and guest posts of interest to your fiction readers is a platform building activity.

Putting out new books and expanding your body of work is a platform building activity.

Arguably, all of them can be more effective than posting a blog online or building ten hours of TikTok videos.

They key part of what we’re doing is building authority and connection with readers, then using that connection to sell books.

Because here’s the thing very few authors consider with regards to online platforms.

Social media is in the attention business, but so are we.

The biggest cost to sitting down and reading a book isn’t the price per volume, but the hours and minutes a reader has to spend consuming our story and the risk that time will be wasted if they don’t like what we’ve written

Looking to level up your writing and publishing? When you’re ready, here are some ways I can help:

  1. Books I’ve Written: I’ve got a few books on writing and the writing business, including the collection of some of my best writing advice: You Don’t Want To Be Published and Other Things Nobody Tells You When You First Start Writing.
  2. Books I Publish: When I’m not working on my GenrePunk Ninja Projects I’m the editor and publisher behind Brain Jar Press. We’ve published several books and chapbooks about writing, drawing on advice and presentations given by some of the best speculative fiction writers in Australia and beyond.
  3. One On One Mentoring: I offer a limited amount of one-on-one mentoring and coaching for writers and publishers, built off two decades of teaching writing and publishing for universities, writers festivals, and non-profit organisations. 

Psychology, Memory, and “Write First Thing In The Morning”

PETERMBALL GenrePunk Ninja

For years, I’ve been a start your writing first thing in the morning guy.

I get up around 4:30 AM most days. On good days, I feed the cats and hammer a few words into the word processor by 5, then braindump into my journal before planning the day.

I can jam out a good hour of writing before the rest of house rises. Maybe two, on a weekend, when the spouse-mouse gets to sleep in.

On a bad day, I try for 50 words or so. Just something to get my toe in.

Because here’s the thing: even if I don’t finish all the writing tasks on the list, starting the day with writing sets my focus. It’s easier to go back and finish the things.

If I skip those 50 words, getting to the keyboard will be a struggle. Other things take priority, and writing becomes one more task I need to find the time to do, rather than the thing I’ve already started and should get back to.

Lately, I’ve been pondering how much this start early, stay focused approach relates to the Zeigarnik effect.

Why Unfinished Tasks Stick In Your Memory

If you spend a lot of time splitting your focus between multiple projects or priorities, it’s worth getting familiar with the work of Bluma Wulfovna Zeigarnik (and it’s not just because her name is exceptional) and Maria Ovsiankina (ditto).

Back in the twenties, Zeigarnik did some of the first psychological studies into the relationship between your memory and unfinished tasks, and she even lends her name to a phenomenon known as the Zeigarnik Effect.

The simplified version of the effect is this: tasks that are interrupted are more easily recalled than those that were completed. They linger in our memory.

The inspiration for Zeigarnik’s work started with servers in cafes and restaurants.

Her professor and mentor noted servers would memorize huge amounts of detail about customers, orders, and unpaid bills while serving, but the specific details vanished the moment delivery finished and the order paid for.

One could chat with a server for hours and they’d remember anyone, yet if you returned to the restaurant an hour after the meal to collect a forgotten hat, the same server would struggle to remember you, your table, or your order.

Zeigarnik wanted to explore this phenomenon and set out to do a series of experiments and quickly noticed a correlation between memory and unfinished tasks.

In one early experiment, she discovered 110 children out of 138 subjects had better recall of a puzzle they were working on when interrupted halfway through and then allowed to return to the task.

Open Loops

Productivity gurus have a different name for the Zeigarnik effect: open loops.

The stuff we start and leave unfinished stays with us, taking up brainpower and bits of mental energy. A big part of most productivity practices involves limiting and closing the number of open loops on your plate.

Not because they’re inherently a bad thing, but because you want to devote your open loops to the most critical tasks on your to-do list.

So when I kick off my day with writing and get even a few words into a story, I have an open loop in my head. I may be elsewhere, focused on doing the dishes or mentoring or shipping books around the world.

But part of my brain is still keeping the story alive, figuring out how to progress it. I can recall where I’m up to, and what might come next.

And I’m eager to get back to it.

This is where Maria Ovsiankina comes in, because she ran a series of experiments around the Zeigarnik effect and discovered that starting a task and interrupting it creates a need to go back and finish that task, even if there is no additional incentive or need to do so.

The open loop creates intrusive thoughts, getting stuck in the mind and potentially creating stress if you’re unable to get back to them.

Juggling Priorities

There’s a lot more detailed study and debate around both these phenomena, but if you’ve ever danced between multiple priorities, you have felt something akin to the Zeigarnik Effect in action.

We all get interrupted halfway through a task, whether through an intentional time limit (I can only work on this for an hour) or a clash of priorities (I want to write, but my partner rightly thinks I should unload the dishwasher like I promised).

On a good day, we can harness those interruptions to come back to the project refreshed, but on a bad day the Zeigarnik Effect will make us grouchy, stressed out, and prone to procrastination.

This is particularly true if your life involve multiple tasks or priorities that rely on your ability to engage in deep, focused work, and you frequently put down one complex task in order to start another.

Deep, focused work is tiring as hell, especially when done back-to-back.

More importantly, it’s consuming if you step away before you’re ready to — big projects used to haunt me when they were unfinished. The Ovsiankina impulse to get back to them and clear the decks was too strong.

I often manged badly. Getting up in the middle of the night and do a few extra hours work just to clear my head, lest insomnia kick my ass.

If I couldn’t do that, I’d get overwhelmed and grumpy… and that grumpiness soon turned into anxiety and depression.

Here’s the thing about writing and publishing: even when your full time, it’s a gig with a lot of small, bitty tasks that need doing. It’s never just writing the story, it’s submitting and publishing and marketing and interviews.

Couple that with the bigger problem: most writers and publishers aren’t working at it full time. It’s a priority among a sea of priorities, some of which put limits on our time.

So it pays to figure out how to play smart with your brain.

Tricking Your Brain Into Working For You

The nice thing about the Zeigarnik Effect is this: your brain’s management of open loops is insanely easy to trick.

If you’re walking away from a half-finished project, all it takes is jotting down when you’ll be resuming work and it’ll satisfy the part of your brain that wants to keep focused on it. Loop closed, temporarily, until you’re ready to re-open.

Better yet, it can work even if you don’t have the specific time in mind — one reason writing to-do lists is so soothing to our psyche is that the very act of writing them down closes open loops.

It’s also the reason to-do lists are so easy to ignore once they’re done — your brain files the entry away as “finished” now, and your subconscious is no longer gnawing at the unfinished stump of the task.

You can see echoes of this in many productivity systems, particularly the “next action” approach to tracking projects in one of the venerable heavyweights of the division, David Allen’s Getting Things Done.

Knowing how to put the brain in park is an essential skill for any writer, but as I hinted at the start of this essay, sometimes leaving an open loop on a complex project is hugely beneficial.

If I’m stuck on a scene in a novel, for example, it’s usually because I’m taking too few chances or writing to a cliche.

Leaving the work half-finished at the start or end of the day gives my subconscious an opportunity to draw unexpected connections, and by the next time I sit down to write, there will be a new slant or twist to make the scene.

The Second Half Of My Morning Routine

On a good day, I start with writing. On a great day, I follow my writing session with 15 minutes of brain-dump journaling.

I do this because open loops are incredibly useful to me in certain situations. In others, I want to close that loop off if the next major task on my list isn’t related to writing or I’m splitting my focus between multiple projects.

Ergo, I start my day with writing. I open the loop and use it to provide my through-line.

But I also brain dump major projects.

Whenever I need to set a project aside for a while—to get it out of my head so I can focus on other stuff—my first port of call is writing things down.

I usually start with a particular phrase: “here’s some interesting ideas for/problem I’m struggling with around <>”.
Then I’ll fill a page based on that prompt, or something like it. Occasionally, I’ll go a little further, but I try to keep it contained and simple — one page or fifteen minutes of focus.

Never more than half an hour or three pages of scribbled notes. The important thing is that it happens before I sit down to plan the coming day.

The brain dump journal may look like a brainstorming space, but that’s just an illusion. In truth, it’s a cheat that’s designed to let me have my cake and eat it too.

Leaving the project unfinished gives my subconscious time to noodle over the possibilities while I’m not meant to be working, and it’s rare I sit down in the morning without some fresh insight or connection that I hadn’t considered the day before.

Brain dumping before I start work for the day — or even planning/reviewing my work for the day — captures those insights and puts the project in “park” to clear my focus for the day ahead.

Writing things down closes the loop so it doesn’t drag on our focus.

This is especially useful when I’m making the switch from a fiction project to non-fiction, or from writing to editorial or mentoring work.

That would be perk enough, but over the years I’ve noticed projects that are ‘parked’ in the journal unfinished are typically easier to pick up after a break, even if I’ve left them to lie fallow for a week or more.

Sometimes I may have to go back and read the entry associated with it to collect the loose threads, but once that’s done, I can pick up where I left off and hit the ground running.

Just like the kids in Zeigarnik’s early experiment, the interruption improves my recall of the contours and specifics of the problem.

The One-Two Punch: Write First, Then Journal

The brain dump journal is a powerful tool for anyone splitting their focus between too many goals or identities, but not always an easy one to maintain.

Handwriting in a journal always felt like a luxury before I knew the psychology behind it, which meant it got set aside when things got too hectic and I wanted to focus on productive work.

It took diving into the work of Zeigarnik and Ovsiankina to wrap my head around why the journal was useful and essential, which made it easier to justify the habit when things get hectic.

Admittedly, you don’t need to embrace the journal — the process of interruption and “parking” projects by writing a next step can work just as effectively — but I’ve discovered that a kicking off with a writing session and a brain ump session l makes for a great lynchpin for the rest of my day.

Looking to level up your writing and publishing? When you’re ready, here are some ways I can help:

  • Books I’ve Written: I’ve got a few books on writing and the writing business, including the collection of some of my best writing advice: You Don’t Want To Be Published and Other Things Nobody Tells You When You First Start Writing.
  • Books I Publish: When I’m not working on my GenrePunk Ninja Projects I’m the editor and publisher behind Brian Jar Press. We’ve published several books and chapbooks about writing drawn from some of the best speculative fiction writers in Australia and beyond.
  • One On One Mentoring: I offer a limited amount of one-on-one mentoring and coaching for aspiring writers and publishers, built off two decades of teaching writing and publishing for universities, writer festivals, and non-profit organisations.

What Just Clicked for Me While Talking to D—!

PETERMBALL Journal

On Staying Small and Going All In

I’m up at 4:00 AM talking to D—  from tech support, trying to work out (for the ninth time since October) a weird glitch that means I can receive emails but not send them through some of my accounts.

I’m very familiar with the tech support script at this stage: First, D— understands how frustrating this is for me.

Then, he asks the same questions I’ve answered in the last eight rounds, gets me to delete my email software and set it up from scratch, and change some passwords.

Then D—makes a change to the back end, asks me to wait 24 to 48 hours, and promises that this time it’ll be fixed for sure.

By now, I ask for the log number of our call, because I know I’ll be contacting them again in 28 hours and going through the exact same script again with a different member of the tech support team.

I try to be polite through the whole thing, because I’ve worked tech support before. D— is one of a huge team of tech support folks working for a major ISP and m problem—whatever it is—doesn’t fit into their script.

At the same time, I’m one of their smaller customers. They’ve got no real incentive to prioritize my issues, and it’s not D—‘s ass on the line if this doesn’t get resolved.

Which is actually one of the things I love about running Brain Jar Press and GenrePunk books: we’re small1. I’m hands-on with every aspect of the business. I get to know my readers and what they’ve ordered and where problems arise.

One of the best things about running my own store, rather than sending folks to places like Amazon, is getting excited about each new reader who shows up or coming to recognise the real hardcore fans who are there for each new book.

My ass is always all the line when it comes to Brain Jar and GenrePunk. I’m all in on every interaction, and I’m invested in solving problems when readers contact me on the rare occasions things have gone wrong.

It also means I can occasionally do projects just because a handful of people are going to love them.

A reader will mention how much they love stories about time travel or Vikings or TV shows like Sliders, and that will sit in the back of my mind until a short story or novella pops out.

In this case the story is On The Corner of Caxton and Petrie, 12:04 AM, which will appear in Unfamiliar Shores coming out later this month.

We live in a world that celebrates huge corporations, and even my anti-capitalist ass can recognise the benefits of them.

But there’s still something to be said working hands on and personal with your readers, and it’s literally one of the best parts of this gig.

  1. Even the “we” can be msileading here, as it’s often just me and the cats. My Spouse-Mouse is there when Brain Jar needs them, and there’s the occasional freelancer or intern, but current day-to-day operations are all me. ↩︎