Read on Twitter
Little percolating thread-thought on the mystery of platform—specifically why giant social media followings don’t necessarily translate to giant book sales. I welcome your feedback along the way ...
Obviously a medium constrained to 280-character thoughts at a time is different from one constrained to 40-60,000 words at a time. So a hot tweet doesn’t necessarily extrapolate to a hot book, any more than a hot book easily distills to a hot tweet (much as we wish it would).
But it’s more than that: The medium shapes the messenger, I think, so someone who has mastered the form of social media has to work that much harder to achieve and maintain mastery of the longer form. The brain is rewiring tweet by tweet, so to speak, to distill out nuance.
Meanwhile, someone who has achieved some mastery of long-form writing, especially having written several books, has to work harder to write a tweet because they’re preoccupied by what goes unsaid—their brain is wired toward fuller expression. (Again, just a percolating thought.)
I’m mulling this over because I’m in publishing and we are always under pressure to make decisions based on an author’s platform (or lack thereof), and the easiest measure is followers and friends. And yet I’ve yet to see a calculation that accurately predicts book sales from it.
This is important to me because our publisher brains are being rewired too—every time we make a guess at how a book will do we look at social media stats. And that gets passed along to authors (and would-be authors) who invest more energy into more friends and followers.
And THAT threatens to rewire authors’ brains away from the processes required for a really good book length treatment on a topic. I’m not saying that’s an automatic outcome, but it makes everything harder for everyone.
Years ago now I wrote a series of blog posts trying to tease out what a more humanizing approach to platform might be. Not sure I got there but I do find myself going back to it a lot: https://loud-time.blogspot.com/search?q=Platform+for+postmodern&m=1
Anyway, I think it can be cathartic and even generative to occasionally open the floor for complaints and laments about platform. So if you want to do that now, please go ahead. #platformblues
