I am going to be honest with you: I have watched talented authors sabotage themselves trying to build a platform. I have watched them burn out on Twitter, post on Instagram with the hollow cheerfulness of someone who would rather be doing literally anything else, and start newsletters they abandoned after four issues. The publishing industry tells authors they need a platform, and it is right about that, but it rarely tells them how to build one without losing their minds in the process. So I am going to try.

First, let me define what I mean by “author platform,” because the term gets thrown around loosely. Your platform is the sum of your ability to reach potential readers directly. It includes your social media following, your email list, your website traffic, your speaking engagements, your media contacts, your professional network, and any other channel through which you can communicate with people who might buy your book. It is not the same as your reputation, though the two are related. You can have a great reputation among other writers and editors but no platform if those people are not also your potential readers.

The reason publishers care about platform is simple math. When we publish a book, we are making a financial bet. The money we spend on editing, design, printing, distribution, and marketing has to be recouped through sales. An author with an existing platform brings a built-in audience to that bet, which reduces the risk. An author with no platform at all requires us to generate all the awareness from scratch, which is expensive and uncertain.

I say this not to stress you out but to explain the reality. At ScrollWorks, we have published authors with large platforms and authors with essentially no platform at all. Both can work. But having a platform does make everything easier, for you and for us. So how do you build one without making yourself miserable?

The first and most important piece of advice I can give is this: pick one thing and do it well. The biggest mistake I see authors make is trying to be everywhere at once. They set up accounts on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn. They start a blog, a newsletter, and a podcast. They attend every conference, join every online community, and accept every invitation to do a guest post or interview. Within three months, they are exhausted, their content is spread thin across a dozen platforms, and none of those platforms has enough consistent activity to actually grow an audience.

Do not do this. Pick one primary platform and one secondary platform. That is it. Your primary platform is where you invest most of your time and energy. Your secondary platform is where you maintain a minimal presence. Everything else can wait until your primary platform is running smoothly.

Which platform should you pick? This depends on you. Not on what the latest marketing guru recommends, not on which platform has the most users, and not on what your author friends are doing. It depends on which platform feels the most natural to you. If you enjoy writing longer pieces and engaging in detailed conversations, a newsletter or blog might be your best bet. If you are visual and like sharing images, Instagram could work. If you are witty and enjoy rapid-fire exchanges, Twitter (or whatever it is calling itself these days) might be right. If you are comfortable on camera and like explaining things, YouTube or TikTok could be the move.

The platform that works best is the one you will actually use consistently. Consistency matters more than reach, at least in the early stages. An author who posts thoughtful content on Instagram three times a week for a year will build a more engaged audience than an author who posts on five different platforms sporadically for the same year. The algorithm on every platform rewards consistency, and more importantly, your potential readers reward it too. People follow accounts that feel alive and active. They unfollow accounts that feel abandoned.

Now, what should you actually post? This is where a lot of authors get stuck, and I think the problem is that they are overthinking it. They feel like every post has to be a performance, a perfectly crafted piece of content that entertains, informs, and promotes their book simultaneously. That is an impossible standard, and trying to meet it is a fast track to burnout.

Here is my framework. Think of your platform content as falling into four categories: insight, process, personality, and promotion. The ratio should be roughly 30-30-30-10. Let me explain each one.

Insight content is where you share your expertise or perspective on topics related to your book’s subject matter. If you have written a historical novel set during the Civil War, your insight content might be interesting historical facts, lesser-known stories from the period, or your take on how that era is represented in popular culture. If you have written a self-help book about productivity, your insight content might be practical tips, observations about work habits, or responses to current discussions about work-life balance. The key is to provide genuine value. Give people a reason to follow you beyond the fact that you have a book to sell.

Process content is where you share what it is like to be a writer. People are genuinely curious about this. How do you structure your writing day? What does your revision process look like? How do you handle rejection? What books are you reading right now and how are they influencing your work? Process content works because it makes your audience feel like they know you, which builds the kind of connection that eventually translates into book sales. It also tends to attract other writers, who are often enthusiastic book buyers and recommenders.

Personality content is where you let people see who you are beyond your professional identity. Your hobbies, your interests, your sense of humor, your opinions about things that have nothing to do with writing. This might feel irrelevant, but it is actually the glue that holds the rest together. People do not buy books from brands. They buy books from people they feel connected to. If your audience knows that you are obsessed with competitive birdwatching, or that you cook elaborate meals when you are stuck on a plot problem, or that you have strong opinions about the correct way to make coffee, they feel like they know you as a human being. That feeling of familiarity and connection is what turns a casual follower into someone who preorders your book.

Promotion content is where you directly ask people to buy, preorder, review, or share your book. This should be the smallest slice of your content, roughly 10 percent. I know that feels counterintuitive. The whole point of building a platform is to sell books, right? Yes, but direct promotion is the least effective form of content for building an audience. Nobody follows an author for the ads. They follow for the insight, process, and personality, and then when a promotional post appears in that context, they are receptive to it because they already feel invested in you and your work.

The biggest mistake I see authors make with promotion is going too hard too soon. They build a following of 500 people and then start posting “BUY MY BOOK” three times a day. Those 500 people either unfollow or mute them. A better approach is to build your audience to a meaningful size by providing consistent value, and then promote your book occasionally and naturally within that stream of valuable content. Your followers will be much more responsive to a promotional post from someone they have been enjoying following for six months than to a promotional post from someone who has been doing nothing but promotion.

Let me talk about email newsletters specifically, because I think they are the most underrated platform-building tool for authors. Social media platforms can change their algorithms at any time, reducing your reach overnight. Your social media followers belong to the platform, not to you. If Twitter implodes or Instagram changes its algorithm (again), your carefully built audience can evaporate.

An email list is different. Those subscribers are yours. You own that relationship. No algorithm sits between you and your readers. When you send an email, it lands in their inbox. They might not open it, but at least it arrives. And email open rates for author newsletters are typically much higher than social media engagement rates. A well-maintained author newsletter might have a 40-50 percent open rate. A social media post might reach 5-10 percent of your followers organically. The math is clear.

Starting a newsletter is simple. Pick a platform (Substack, Mailchimp, ConvertKit, whatever), set up a landing page, and start publishing. The hard part is growing the list, and the secret to that is offering something worth subscribing to. “Sign up for my newsletter” is not compelling. “Sign up and get a free short story set in the world of my novel, plus monthly behind-the-scenes notes on my writing process” is compelling. Give people a concrete reason to hand over their email address.

How often should you send your newsletter? Once or twice a month is the sweet spot for most authors. Weekly is ambitious and will lead to burnout unless you genuinely enjoy the format. Less than monthly and your subscribers will forget who you are. The content should follow the same 30-30-30-10 framework I described above: a mix of insight, process, personality, and occasional promotion.

Now let me address the mental health aspect of this, because it is real and it does not get talked about enough. Building a platform is emotionally taxing. You are putting yourself out there repeatedly, and the feedback is often silence. You post something you spent an hour crafting and it gets three likes. You send a newsletter and your open rate drops. You see other authors with massive followings and feel like you are failing.

Here is what I tell our authors at ScrollWorks: set process goals, not outcome goals. An outcome goal is “I want 10,000 followers by the end of the year.” A process goal is “I will post three times a week and send one newsletter a month.” You can control the process. You cannot control the outcome. And if you tie your emotional well-being to follower counts and engagement metrics, you will make yourself miserable because those numbers fluctuate for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of your content.

I also recommend time-boxing your platform work. Decide in advance how many hours per week you are going to spend on platform building, and stick to that limit. For most authors, three to five hours per week is plenty. That is enough time to create a few pieces of content, respond to comments and messages, and do a little bit of engagement with other accounts. It is not enough time to fall into the social media doom scroll, which is where the real mental health damage happens.

When you sit down to do your platform work, set a timer. When the timer goes off, close the app and go do something else. Preferably, go write. Because the best thing you can do for your author platform, the thing that matters more than any amount of social media strategy, is write a great book. A great book creates its own platform through word of mouth, reviews, and reader enthusiasm. All the social media savvy in the world will not save a mediocre book, and a truly excellent book will find readers even if the author’s social media game is nonexistent.

One more thing. It is okay to take breaks. If platform building is making you anxious, or if it is interfering with your writing, step back. Take a month off social media. Skip a few newsletters. Your audience will still be there when you come back, and the break might actually generate goodwill. When you return, you can be honest about why you took a break. “I needed to focus on finishing my book” is a perfectly valid reason, and your followers will respect it because they want you to write the next book more than they want you to post on Instagram.

Building an author platform is a long game. Most overnight successes in publishing were actually built over years of quiet, consistent effort. The authors I know with the strongest platforms are the ones who found a sustainable rhythm, who showed up regularly without burning out, and who focused on being genuinely interesting rather than relentlessly promotional. If you can do that, even imperfectly, you will be fine. And if your book is as good as I suspect it is, the platform will eventually catch up to the work. You can see how some of our own authors at ScrollWorks have approached this by checking out their book pages, where the work speaks for itself alongside whatever platform they have built around it.