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I Dreaded Platform-Building, Until I Started Doing It
“The doing is the thing,” as Amy Poehler says.
A couple of years ago, I was querying agents with a couple of different books.
If you’ve never queried, I’ll tell you right now it’s a job in itself. You spend days and days going through agency websites, Twitter and Manuscript Wishlist to double and triple-check you’ve got everything right, you try to craft the query as well as possible and answer all the different requirements of each agent, and you polish your grammar until your eyes hurt.
All to, possibly, crickets, or form rejections.
Now, it’s really tough to grab an agent’s attention. Most of them receive dozens of queries every day, and it’s not their only job to go through them. Agenting itself is likely not their only job, so you only have a couple of seconds to catch them before they click away and your query is sent to their trash folder.
One of the best ways to get the agent’s attention is by showing you’re a serious writer. This might mean an MFA, or showing you’re participating in the writing community, that you’re going to writers’ conferences, or that you have a platform.
Having a platform is not as necessary for fiction writers as it is for non-fiction writers, but it helps.
