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:
- 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 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.
- 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.
