What Does the Term "BORROWED PLATFORM" mean for Writers?

by Julie Lavender @JLavenderWrites
What is the meaning of the term borrowed platform? Well, I’m glad you asked, because those two little words helped me land a writing contract for my book that releases this month.  I shared last month about my “third time’s a charm” story of acquiring a contract with Revell for my parenting book, 365 Ways to Love Your Child: Turning Little Moments Into Lasting Memories, after speaking to editor Vicki Crumpton three years in a row at writing conferences. 
To recap briefly, I shared the idea for my book during a one-on-one session with Vicki at Blue Ridge in 2017. She liked the idea and said my agent, Cyle Young, could send her the proposal. However, she mentioned that I should have a blog, to build an audience, and she extolled the virtue of connecting with others through social media sites. 
I spent the next year learning how to blog, tweet, and post on Instagram. Prior to that conference, I’d only posted on Facebook.
At Blue Ridge the following year, I spoke with Vicki again, and she said I’d made a great start, but my numbers needed to be higher on the sites. In other words, I needed a larger audience or platform. I put a lot of time into making cute memes to go along with my daily postings of silly holidays to celebrate. I gained more followers, but the process seemed slow and daunting. 
I’d heard about borrowed platform at conferences, and I decided to try that avenue. My numbers alone on social media were nothing grand, but if I could write for other sites with larger numbers, then I could borrow those numbers as part of my platform, because my bio would reach those same followers on that particular site. 
I spent almost a week, working late into the night, reaching out to over fifty homeschooling blog sites. I shared with the site owners my twenty-five-plus years of homeschooling experience and my writing experience, and I offered suggestions for blog topics that I could provide each month. 
Out of all those emails, I only heard positive responses from three. I heard back from several with a “thanks, but no thanks,” and most didn’t respond to me at all. I’ll admit, I was discouraged at the small number of responses, but, I began to blog monthly for two homeschooling websites and bimonthly for a homeschooling, online magazine. 
(And the cool, God-wink moment? One of the positive responses I received, from a homeschooling mom in Atlanta, just happened to be related to friends from our church, and we figured out we’d met briefly at a Christian concert several years back. She pointed out in the email to me that she’d used the homeschooling devotional I published back in 2005 for years with her kids! And, after I’d written for the site for over a year, my college daughter volunteered to help with a Discipleship-Now weekend through her Baptist Collegiate Ministries organization, and guess what family she wound up spending the weekend with as the host family? That same homeschool family! Isn’t God cool like that?)
Well, by the time I met with Vicki that third year, I was indeed able to show her that my numbers on Facebook had grown to more than 4000 friends and that I had grown my other social media sites. 
But the tipping point for her “yes, I’d like to publish this book,” came when I showed her the borrowed platform from those homeschooling sites. I used my Atlanta friend’s numbers specifically and showed Vicki that my words and bio reached this many people each month: Monthly page views on the website: 32,700Nearly 2,000 email subscribers Facebook likes: 8,205Instagram: 603 (her newest social media community at that time)Twitter: 3,400Pinterest: 25,945 followersAnd that was just one of the three sites that I wrote for—the other two sites had similar numbers. 
Those numbers represented one segment of my target audience for my future parenting book, and since then, I’ve added other borrowed platform numbers from two parenting websites.
Borrowed platform can help you reach the target audience for your manuscript proposal. Find blog sites and websites that represent that audience and offer regular content. Many will say “no,” but some just might say yes. And those readers can become YOUR readers and part of your platform! 
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Julie Lavender looks forward to autumn each year, because summers in south Georgia can be hot and sticky! But she’s especially excited about October this year because of the launch of her newest book, 365 Ways To Love Your Child: Turning Little Moments Into Lasting Memories. Julie would love for you to check out her book for all the parents and child caregivers in your life, and it’s on sale right now, until launch date, for just 5.99 with no shipping cost from the Baker Book House website! See here for details: https://bakerbookhouse.com/products/39538