I always advise author who work with me to think about building their author platform in parallel with the writing of the book.

Your platform comes in two forms – between which there may be some crossover.

Firstly, your offline platform and network – this could consist of professional bodies you might belong to or groups and associations.

Say for example you were writing a book on team building in sports, you would want to connect with all the various sports’ controlling bodies and be working from the grass roots up to professional levels.

Within these bodies you will also find brilliant contacts to validate your book with endorsements and even content.

Secondly, in this wired world, you can now connect instantly with anyone anywhere on the globe with an Internet connection. At the central core of your strategy you need a blog site and/or to be able to publish as a guest on another blog site as  am doing here.

Content is king and is a magnet for both potential readers, publishers and of course search enginess. Many a book has started off as a blog and I always think of my blogs as seeds for potential chapters in a book or even a whole book itself.

A new author called Sarah Lamb came to me with her blog only in July and i just publishing her book based on it next month – that’s 4 months – see www.appreciatingangels.com for more details.

On top of your blog sits your social media strategy which can be fuelled directly from your blog content. For example, each time I blog, it updates my Twitter and Facebook profiles and appears on at least ten other site automatically.

This all in turn leads to increased visibility which then leads to speaking engagements and full workshops from where, of course, you sell your books and associated wares.

The diagram below shows how this all fits together …