Owning Your Platform
Writers are encouraged to spend time building their "author platform." I frequently picture me up on the high dive (a platform dive, of course) with quivering knees preparing to make the leap. What they're referring to, of course, is building Facebook pages, blogs, Twitter followers, etc. Much of this advice is valuable because at the end of the day, it's about reaching readers. Readers who hopefully want to read my stories. After all, what is the point of writing if there's nobody out there to read it? Unlike the writer who is content to have notebook pages filled with stories stuck in the bottom of the filing cabinet, I want to connect with readers.
Two events in the past week have made this entire "author platform" effort deeply unsettling for me. The first is when Facebook changed its policies regarding the ability of authors to host contests. OK, not a big deal – no contests. But this is just another quibble on top of a long list of quibbles that I already have with Facebook. One of the other big quibbles is that as a page owner I have extremely limited tools to be able to see who has "liked" my page. When I pull up the list of names, it is in reverse chronological order with the people who have "liked" the page most recently at the top (and for a several day stretch recently, that list was conveniently displayed in *random* order). I can't sort it, I can't search for a specific person, I can't even bring up a list of my friends who have liked the page. In other words, I have no way of managing this list because I can't even see it properly. Back when I had twenty people who liked my page it was easy, I could scan the list. Scrolling through a list of 242 people looking for one name is much more of a chore. Why is this important? Firstly, I like to connect with the people who have reached out to connect with me. I also like to return the favor if a fan of my page has their own fan page, but it can be difficult to track them down. This makes me feel like although I can use my Facebook page to reach out to readers, it's often more of a one-way communication tool than a two-way unless people engage with the posts on my wall.
And what if they change some other policy or if I forget my password and my Facebook page is locked or deleted? What then? The investment that I've made in cultivating that page is gone. Poof. Will all of those people remember me and seek out my blog? Some of them will. Some probably wouldn't. That's why I feel like I don't really "own" my Facebook page at all. I'm only renting space there and Facebook can pull the rug out from under me at any time.
So, OK, I have issues with Facebook. But Twitter's safe, right? Starting late last week, some users are seeing somebody else's avatar when they view my tweets in their Twitter clients in any search column (e.g., #fridayflash, #tuesdayserial, etc.). In the same way that other people's avatars are important to me – I'm a very visually-oriented person – my own avatar is important to me. It's who I am. So I filed a ticket with Twitter support. Four days ago. No response. Luckily the avatar who's posing as me isn't terribly offensive, it's obviously a woman and she does have brown hair. But she's not me. What if it was an avatar from an obvious spammer. You know the kind. If I'm feeling a bit violated now, imagine how I'd feel then!
And this is just an issue with an avatar. I've had several friends have their accounts completely shut down by spammers. So, it turns out I don't own my platform on Twitter either. Luckily I still have my Twitter connections and hopefully they'll straighten out my avatar. One day.
But at least I'm safe on my blog, right? I own my domain name. I do self-hosting with Wordpress. Yeah right. Remember what happened to my blog in January? I'm still recovering from that.
So, this whole author platform thing is a great goal, but do you own your platform or do you just have a short-term lease using somebody else's technology? Is it a sign that I am too much of a control freak that I don't like these things being out of my hands?
In case you're looking for the "5 tips to make sure you own your author platform," section, it's not here. I don't have any solutions in this post. I'm just venting and wondering if I have a reason to feel nervous about this. So, do I?
