Platforms are Not Just Shoes

If you attend a writers' conference, and I highly recommend that you do, you're bound to hear this word repeated more times than you can count:

PLATFORM

What is a platform? You ask. I certainly did. It turns out that a platform is the base audience a writer creates even before a book is published and, get this, sometimes even before you sign with an agent.
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Once upon a time an author only really needed a platform for non-fiction (i.e. in my case the fact that I'm a college professor creates a rea...