Author Platform The Indie Author's Holy Grail Or A Complete Waste Of Time

By Author: Bobby Patterson
Total Articles: 40
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Author Platform is a very important tool in the hand of a Self Publishing Author just like a potter's wheel is to a Clay Potter. Every Author, both Self Published and Traditionally Published ones always want to have one and dream about having a well established Authors Platform just like Publishing experts would advice.
Even when it comes to book marketing, experts always stressed the importance of building an Author Base Platform to gather lots of targeted audience, audience who will not be only interested in reading a book but that would also be a faithful, loyal and long time reader. Also for Self Publishing Authors who would like to have a book deal venturing into the traditional book publishing arena, building an Author Platform had been said to be better way of getting a book deal from a Publishing Company.
It is not a fact to be disputed that building and having an Author Platform as a Self Publishing Author is of great, tremendous use and a useful leverage to reach out to the right book audience specific to a particular genre, subject or topic to build a loyal tribe of audience and followers. It surely confirms ...
... a Self Published Author's authority in a particular genre, making both the Authors and their books to be visibly known by many and also bringing more publicity to both the Authors and their books.
But the question to ask here is that, with all these mentioned benefit of building and having an Author Base Platform, do Authors Platform really sells books or when it comes to proper book marketing and promotion, building an author platform is just a mere waste of time?
There have been many arguments about focusing on the internal marketing and book promotion optimization available on Online Publishing Platform such as the Kindle Store than building an Author Base Platform and hitting Social Media Networks to promote books.
Such internal book marketing optimization available on The Kindle Store include having the right and easy to rank in book categories, proper book description and tagging, optimizing books for the "look inside" feature of Kindle Books and also optimizing Kindle books to have a catchy and convincing introduction to take advantage of the "Request A Sample" feature available for Kindle eBook where anyone can read the first 10% of a book to know if they will love to buy and read the whole book and many more like that.
Arguments for this cite the instances of traffic coming from blogs and social media networks as having a very low Click Through Rate (CTR) and Conversion Rate, but concentrating efforts and time to placing a book rightly inside the Kindle Book Store to increase its visibility and acceptability rather than focusing on the external traffic with such low CTR offered by Building a blog, having a Social Media follow and many more branches of Author Platform like that.
Such might be true but can such reasons warrant calling Building An Author Platform a mere waste of time when it comes to book marketing and promotion? Is Building An Author base the Author's Holy Grail to book marketing and promotion.
What if Authors sit on the fence and be at both sides focusing on not only building external traffic to book pages but also optimizing the internal factors that could lead to great sales for a book?
Call it a waste of time or call it An Author's Holy Grail, the fact is that Author Base is an indispensable and great tool in the hand of both Self Publishing Authors and Traditional Published Authors.

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