While all memoirs are different, the best ones have certain elements in common. Knowing what makes a memoir compelling and riveting is key when sitting down to craft your own.

When I teach people how to write a memoir, we talk about how to tell a compelling story.

In this article, we’ll review some common memoir elements so you can weave them into your own work. Before we start, let’s define memoir.

What is Memoir?

Memoir is not an autobiography. In other words, it is not the story of your whole life. Memoir is a slice of life, a story of part of your life or a story from your life.

The scope of memoir will vary depending on the subject matter, but more often than not, aspiring memoirists come to the page with too much story that needs to be pared down. One way to do that is to get clear about your themes. Memoir is often reined in by the writer knowing what her themes are and writing each scene while holding two questions in mind:

1. How does this scene relate to my theme?
2. What sense am I trying to make of my story through writing this scene?

Memoir is about creating understanding, making sense of your story so that others can relate. Memoir is not “what happened,” because unless you’re famous, what happened to you in your life is not what will draw readers to the page. What draws readers is the subject matter (surviving a trauma, trying to live by the tenets of self-help books, living in prison) or the theme (addiction, parent-child relationships, repeating family patterns, identity). 

A memoir that lacks an author’s effort to extract meaning from their story is usually a slow read. A reader may find themselves wondering what’s the point? If there’s nothing in the story for the reader, the memoir is lacking reflection and takeaway, which are two key elements that are unique to memoir.  

The Write Life has teamed up with Self-Publishing School to create a training called, Writing and Publishing Your Life Story. In it, you’ll learn the three core elements of memorable memoirs. Click here to sign up for this free workshop.

How to Write a Memoir

If you’re planning to write a memoir, your goal should be to take your readers on a journey they won’t forget. Here are seven tips for how to write a memoir.

1. Narrow Your Focus

Your memoir should be written as if the entire book is a snapshot of a theme or two from your lived experience. Consider a pie, where your life represents the whole pie, and you are writing a book about a teeny-tiny sliver.

Since your memoir is not an autobiography, you can figure out your themes by making a timeline of your life. In the classes I teach, we call these “turning points” and it’s a valuable exercise to discover where the juice is, to sort out where to focus and where you might have the most to extract from your story. You want your readers to walk away knowing you, and a particular experience you lived through, on a much deeper level, but also to apply their own understanding of their own experiences to your story.

Perhaps you are familiar with Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt. This memoir focuses on Frank’s life as a child growing up in Ireland. Angela is his mother, and much of the storyline focuses on the mother-son relationship, and how Frank saw her, as well as the role of outside forces like alcoholism, loss, and trauma on their entire family.

2. Include More than Just Your Story

Even as you narrow your focus, we also need to think bigger in our writing pursuits.

For example, if Kamala Harris wrote a memoir about being a wife and stepmother while pursuing her career, she would pull in tidbits about how she juggled these roles when she had such a big job and big ambitions. She would let us into the intimate moments, including fights she might have had with her husband over the impossible kind of balance women in power who also have families face.  

Likewise, if Madonna was writing a memoir about reinventing herself after 20 years away from the public spotlight, she most likely would include what it felt like to return to the music scene and how she continued to travel and perform while raising her children.

How does this apply to you? Imagine you are writing a memoir about your three-week trek through the Himalayan Mountains. While the focus would be on your trip, as well as what you learned about yourself along the way, you would be wise to also include other details about the place, the people your experience, and what you learned not only about yourself, but about human nature and the wider world.

You could describe the geography and history of the area, share interesting snippets about the people and animals you interacted with, and discuss your exploration of the meaning of it all as you progressed along your arduous journey.

Your readers want to know about you, but also about what got you to this place to begin with. What prompted the trek? What is your backstory? What did you learn about yourself along the way? It’s these kinds of vivid details and astute observations that make for a powerful memoir.

3. Tell the Truth

One of the best tips for how to write a powerful memoir is to be honest and genuine. This is often tricky because we don’t want to hurt or upset the people (our family and friends!) we’ve written into our books. But it’s important that you mine for the truth of your story—even if it makes your journey as an author more difficult.

When Shannon Hernandez wrote her memoir, Breaking the Silence: My Final Forty Days as a Public School Teacher, she knew she had a major dilemma: “If I opted to tell the whole truth, I would pretty much ensure I would never get a job with New York City Public Schools again.”

But she also knew teachers, parents and administrators needed to hear why great teachers are leaving education in droves and why the current educational system is not doing what’s best for our nation’s kids.

“I wrote my book with brutal honesty and it has paid off with my readers. It’s bringing national attention to what is happening behind closed school doors.”

Shannon Hernandez

One more note on honesty: Memoirs explore the concept of truth as seen through your eyes. Never write in a snarky manner or with a bitter tone. The motivation for writing a memoir shouldn’t be to exact revenge, whine, or seek forgiveness; it should simply be to share an experience that readers can relate to.

Don’t exaggerate or bend the truth in your memoir. If you find you can’t remember, that’s alright. You can write composite scenes. You can lean into what “would have been true,” insofar as the details—your mother would have worn a particular style of dress, your best friend would have been chewing her favorite gum, your brother would have yelled something like the insult you decide to write.

You don’t need to fabricate or embellish, but you also didn’t live your life with a tape recorder strapped to your belt, so memoir is all about recreating what happened while honoring the emotional truth of your story.

4. Put Your Readers in Your Shoes

Powerful writers show, not tell. And for a memoir writer, this is essential to your success, because you must invite your reader into your perspective so she can draw her own conclusions.

The best way to do this is to unfold the story before your reader’s eyes by using vivid language that helps your reader visualize each scene. Mary Karr, author of three memoirs and the book, The Art of Memoir, writes that you must zip the reader into your skin. Another way to think of it is to imagine you’re carrying an old-school camcorder on your shoulder as you guide your reader through the scenes of your life. You want to place your reader right there next to you, or better yet, inside of your experiences. 

Perhaps you want to explain that your aunt was a “raging alcoholic.” If you say this directly, your description will likely come across as judgmental and critical.

Instead, paint a picture for your audience so they come to this conclusion on their own. You might write something like this:

“Vodka bottles littered her bedroom, and I had learned the hard way not to knock on her door until well after noon. Most days she didn’t emerge into our living quarters until closer to sunset, and I would read her facial expression to gauge whether or not I should inquire about money—just so I could eat one meal before bedtime.”

FREE RESOURCE

Nonfiction Outline Template

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5. Employ Elements of Fiction to Bring Your Story to Life

Think of the people in memoirs as characters. A great memoir pulls you into their lives: what they struggle with, what they are successful at, and what they wonder about.

Many of the best memoir writers focus on a few key characteristics of their characters, allowing the reader to get to know each one in depth. Your readers must be able to feel emotions about your characters—love or hate or something in between.  

To bring your characters alive, bring details like the characters’ tone of voice, how they talk, their body language and movements, and their style of speech. Read other memoirs to get a sense of how writers introduce place and setting into their stories through their characters—their accents, their behaviors, their shared values.  

While your memoir is a true story, employing elements of fiction can make it far more powerful and enjoyable for your readers, and one point of craft is learning how to create strong characters your readers will feel like they know.

6. Create an Emotional Journey

Don’t aim to knock your readers’ socks off. Knock off their pants, shirt, shoes, and underwear too! Leave your readers with their mouths open in awe, or laughing hysterically, or crying tears of sympathy and sadness—or all three.

Take them on an emotional journey that motivates them to read the next chapter, wonder about you well after they finish the last page, and tell their friends and colleagues about your book. The best way to evoke these feelings in your readers is to connect your emotions, as the protagonist, with pivotal reflections and takeaways about the happening throughout your narrative arc.

Most of us are familiar with the narrative arc. In school, our teachers used to draw a “mountain” and once we reached the precipice, we were to fill in the climatic point of the book or story. Your memoir is no different: You need to create enough tension to shape your overall story, as well as each individual chapter, with that narrative arc.

In Children of the Land by Marcelo Hernandez Garcia, we witness a boy growing up undocumented in the United States, the child of parents who crossed him over the US-Mexico border when he was just five years old. You’ll never find Marcelo telling us he was sad, angry, or devastated. 

Instead, he writes of his disappointment after his mother didn’t get her green card:

“It’s okay, mijo, we tried,” Ama said to me as I drove her to church one day.

“Yeah, Amá, we tried, I said, hoping that between each of our admissions, at least one of us would actually believe it was worth it.

Marcelo Hernandez Garcia

Or of his fear when ICE raids his childhood home: 

We stood there, frozen, unsure of what to do. The inner urge to flee was replaced with paralyzed submission—we were cemented in place. In that moment, if anyone wished to do so, they could have walked through the door, commanded us to cut ourselves open, and we would have probably listened. 

Macelo Hernandez Garcia

7. Showcase Your Personal Growth

By the end of your memoir, you need to have shown growth or change or transformation of yourself, the protagonist of your story.  

Whatever experiences you had throughout your book will carry more weight when you show how they affected you along your journey, and how you grew and changed as a result of what you lived through, or what you survived. How did what you went through change your approach to life? Change how you thought about others or yourself? Help you become a better or wiser person in some way?

This is often the hardest part of writing a memoir because it requires introspection—sometimes in the form of hindsight, certainly in the form of self-reflection. It requires you sometimes to write with an understanding that your character might not have known then—at the age you were. This is why it’s so important to learn how to weave in reflections that don’t break the fictive dream.

You don’t want to constantly interrupt your narrative with asides, like:

• “Now I understand… ”
• “I still wish my mother had treated me better … ”

Instead, allow for the reflection to exist almost as if it’s an omniscient knowing, because in many ways it is. No one knows your story better than you—and you’re allowed, throughout your story—to extract meaning and apply understanding. Not only are you allowed, the genre demands it.  

If you make meaning from your story, your readers will find meaning in your story too.

Memoir Examples as Inspiration

Let’s look at a few memoir examples.

We broke these into three categories of memoirs, those that can help us learn about structure, theme and takeaway. Each of these are essential elements of the genre.

Examples of Memoirs that Use an Effective Structure

Although you’ll hear from memoirists who didn’t use an outline, or who prefer a process over a structured experience, most memoirists can benefit from having a structure in place before they start writing.

The most straightforward memoirs are those that start at point A and end at point B, moving the reader along in linear time.

Some examples include coming-of-age memoirs, like Kiese Laymon’s Heavy or Daisy Hernandez’s A Cup of Water Under My Bed, or memoirs that are narrowly focused, like Lori Gottleib’s Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, or Jennifer Pastiloff’s On Being Human.

Then there are framed memoirs, like Dani Shapiro’s Inheritance which chronicles the A to B linear journey of finding out that the father who raised her was not her biological father, making use of flashback and memory to piece together the front story of what’s happening as she figures out the truth of who she really is. Wild by Cheryl Strayed, is another famous framed memoir, because the A to B story is her trek along the Pacific Crest Trail, but the use of flashback and memory has her constantly leaving the front story and entering into the backstory to give context for why she’s on this journey in the first place. 

There are also thematic memoirs, like Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries, which focuses on themes of identity and trauma and its impact on her and her family, but reaches more broadly into the experience of being Native American. 

Examples of Thematic Memoirs

Thematic memoirs abound typically sell better than other memoirs because they’re what the industry calls “high-concept,” meaning that they’re easy for buyers and readers to wrap their minds around.

Countless categories of memoir point to big-picture themes: addiction and recovery; parenting; travel; cooking; coming-of-age; dysfunctional family; religious experience; death and dying; divorce; and more.

Your theme (or sometimes themes) infuses every chapter you write, and it/they can be quite nuanced. For instance, a theme might be healing through running.

Once you identify your theme, you must always keep sight of it. I liken this to wearing a pair of tinted glasses. If you put on glasses with purple lenses, you can still see the entirety of the world around you, but you will never forget that you’re wearing the glasses because everything you look at is tinted purple.

The same should be true with good memoir: introduce the reader to your world, but keep your memoir contained and on point by keeping your principal (and sometimes secondary) themes front and center.

Single-issue memoirs about things like addiction, body image, or illness — including books like Hunger: A Memoir of (My Body) by Roxane Gay;  Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood by Koren Zailckas; Sick: A Memoir by Porochista Khakpour; or Laura M. Flynn’s Swallow the Ocean: A Memoir, about growing up with a mentally unwell parent are all great examples. 

For travel memoirs, or food memoirs, or memoirs of leaving home, check out books like The Expedition by Chris Fagan; or A Tiger in the Kitchen by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan; or Blood, Bones, and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton.

Examples of Memoirs with Strong Takeaways

Takeaway is your gift to the reader. It’s a message, reflection, or truism.

Sometimes these fall at the end of scenes or the end of chapters, but that’s not always necessary. Takeaway can happen at any moment, when the author shares something heartfelt, universal, and true.

It’s those moments in reading memoir that hit you hard because you can relate—even if you haven’t had the exact experience the author is describing.

Understanding takeaway is a long process, and some authors, when they first start thinking about takeaway, make the mistake of being too overt or trying too hard.

These are subtle moments of observation about the world around you, a wrapping up of an experience through a lesson learned or the sharing of the way something impacted you. The idea is to sprinkle these moments into your chapters, without overwhelming or spoon-feeding your reader.

Good writers do this so seamlessly you don’t even realize it happened, except that you feel like he or she has burst your heart, or crushed you with the weight of their insight. You feel like you know the author because it’s as if she’s speaking directly to you.

Good takeaway is, in fact, mirroring. It’s a way of relaying that we are not alone and the world is a crazy place, isn’t it?

As an example, here’s a reflective passage from Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia:

But is it such a bad thing to live like this for just a little while? Just for a few months of one’s life, is it so awful to travel through time with no greater ambition than to find the next lovely meal? Or to learn how to speak a language for no higher purpose than that it pleases your ear to hear it? Or to nap in a garden, in a patch of sunlight, in the middle of the day, right next to your favorite foundation? And then to do it again the next day? Of course, no one can live like this forever.

Elizabeth Gilbert

Not all reflective passages have to be questions, but you can see that this technique is effective. Gilbert is ruminating over the life she’s living, but which she cannot maintain; in her experience—through the vantage point of her American understanding of the world—it’s not possible, and undoubtedly 99% of her readers agree.

We all know what it feels like to be saddled by the burdens of everyday life. Gilbert’s readers would feel this passage on a visceral level, even if they’d never before been to Italy, because everyone understands the longing that’s wrapped up in allowing yourself to just let down. And that’s what makes this a takeaway; it’s a universal connection to the reader.

Now get out there and write!

When you follow these examples and these seven guidelines for writing your memoir, you will captivate your audience and leave them begging for more.

But more importantly, you will share your own authentic story with the world.

Ready to learn more about sharing your story with the world?

FREE RESOURCE

Nonfiction Outline Template

Ready to write? Get the parts of your story RIGHT and finish your book FASTER with this pre-formatted, easy to use, fill-in-the-black template!

This is an updated version of a story that was previously published. We update our posts as often as possible to ensure they’re useful for our readers.

If you’re an aspiring author who doesn’t know what an author platform is, you might be the very definition of ignorant bliss.

I say this with love, maybe even a little envy, because author platform has taken on an astoundingly important role when it comes to whether or not a writer will get a traditional publishing contract — and it’s equally important to self-published authors who are serious about their writing careers.

The rise of the author platform as an industry obsession is a relatively new phenomenon. While industry folks may argue that platform has always mattered, today it’s more important than ever before.

A huge shift has transpired in the past decade when it comes to what agents and editors weigh when deciding what projects to represent or publish — and in some cases an author’s star quality matters more than his or her actual book.

I acquired nonfiction women’s books for Seal Press over the course of eight years during the height of this shift. In 2004, when I started, author platform was barely on our radar; by the time I left in 2012, it was the most important factor in determining whether or not we’d make an offer on a project. Now, post-2020, it is more important than ever! And simultaneously, it’s easier than ever to build a platform.

What is author platform?

Many aspiring authors believe that platform is all about social media. They’re partially correct. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest followings are important, but they are not the only piece of the author platform pie.

Here’s what I was looking for as an editor and what I now try to help authors hit in their book proposals:

Some of these factors, like personality and ability to execute, are difficult to gauge. But these very factors are why authors with popular blogs and established fan bases get book deals: because they’ve proven that they have a cult of personality, and they follow-through.

These important yet intangible factors also highlight one of the ways in which literary agents are valuable to editors. If an agent and an editor have a strong working relationship, oftentimes the agent serves as someone who’s vetting an author’s personality and follow-through.

Differentiating yourself is crucial

Even though personality is only 10% of the pie, differentiating yourself is underlying the whole thing.

Investing time and effort in your personal brand is crucial to your success as an author. If you’re asking, “What’s in it for me?” you should know the most important element of a personal brand is that it helps you stand out from the crowd and carve out your niche.

After all, there is no competition for you. Knowing how you want to differentiate yourself will save you time too, because you won’t try to be all things to all people.

Branding is about how you are perceived in the market, and today you have control over that perception. Personal brand management is about collecting and presenting the pieces that tell your story.

You can shape this perception by running all the content you create through a filter, asking: Is this congruent and true to my brand?

Two examples of strong author platform

Both of these authors garnered large advances on the strength of their platforms (which were not specifically strong on social media) while I worked with them.

1. Andrea Robinson, author of Toss the Gloss

Andrea had almost no social media presence, no previous books, and not much by way of previous coverage. She couldn’t showcase that she had a strong existing readership, either. So how was Andrea differentiated from the next person?

• What she had was a well-known agent I had bought books from in the past (personal referral) and whom I trusted when she told me Andrea would execute.
• Her contacts were stellar — including Ralph Lauren, who ultimately gave her a blurb and threw her launch party. How many people can say they know Ralph Lauren personally and that he would throw a party for them?!
• She was also clearly an expert on her topic, maybe even an industry leader, having worked in the beauty industry for decades. Seal made a strong offer for the rights to publish her book.

2. Mark Nepo, author of The Book of Awakening

In 2010, Oprah chose Mark’s The Book of Awakening (originally published in 2000) as one of her ultimate favorite things, shooting it to the New York Times bestseller list and changing the course of his career.

When Mark got picked up by Simon & Schuster for his next book following his meteoric rise to fame, he had a negligible social media presence and little previous media. He had a new fan in Oprah, though (contacts!), a huge existing readership, expertise in spades and a whole library of previous books to his credit.

In Mark’s case, the Oprah touch made a big difference (when doesn’t it?), but he’d sold a book to a traditional publisher just a few months before being “discovered” by Oprah, so while his advances are bigger now than they were, he’s an example of an author who was already getting publishing deals based on expertise, an existing readership, and previous books.

Author platform isn’t just for nonfiction writers

In case any fiction writers are reading this and wondering whether any of this matters to you, the answer is yes. Just listen to this podcast from bestselling fiction author, Ramy Vance.

If you look at the pie chart above, you may feel that your area of expertise matters little to the novel you’re writing, but is that really true? For instance, one of my clients works in the medical transplant field, and she’s writing a thriller whose central focus is about an illegally obtained organ. Her expertise matters a lot — as do her contacts in the medical world.

Fiction authors are scrutinized for the other aspects of platform as well: contacts, previous books, previous media, social media, readership, ability to execute. It may take getting a book or two under your belt to grow a readership (which is why there’s a case for novelists to kick off their own careers through indie publishing), but no, you’re not off the hook.

• Related: Effective Book Marketing Strategies for Consistent Sales
• Related: How to Market a Fiction Box Set
• Related: How to Market a Self-Published Book Like a Traditional Publisher

Focus on what works

Track your efforts and focus on what works. This will help you see your progress along the way. And it will also help inform future decisions on what to try next.

Rather than feeling lost and unsure of what to try next, you can look at what has worked and what hasn’t and adjust your course. You’ll have a record of what you’ve done that you can check against blog traffic, newsletter sign-ups, followers per platform, or content downloads.

For example, if you keep track of podcast downloads after sharing each episode on social media, you’ll be able to see if there is a direct correlation. Is one effort feeding another?

Time is what it all boils down to: writers, perhaps working at another job or taking care of family, have very limited time, and marketing can easily eat up most of it, leaving little for you to actually write. The goal is to find what works, then 80/20 it. Do the 20% of things that bring you 80% of the results.

Whatever system you use to plan your marketing, make it work for you.

Building your author platform is a process

If you’re a writer who wants to publish in any capacity, author platform can be a difficult thing to wrap your mind around. What’s expected of you can feel overwhelming, if not insurmountable.

In addition to teaching and writing about platform, I’m growing my own, so I empathize with the glazed-over looks I sometimes get from authors who ask me questions like, “Do I really have to do all of this if I want to be a published author?”

The key is to take it slow. For writers who are just beginning, it can feel like you’re coming really late to a party that’s been going on for years — and that’s in essence exactly what’s happening. If you look at someone who has thousands upon thousands of Twitter followers, it’s likely they were an early adopter.

Remember that what you bring to the table already — just by being you — comprises a large part of the pie: expertise, personality, and ability to execute.

With this you at least have a foundation, and possibly, with the right project, enough to land a deal. But most authors need to start to layer on the rest of the components in order to prove to a publishing house that they’re worth a bet. No matter how good they think your book might be, if an editorial board can’t justify its sales potential, they simply won’t offer you a contract.

Remember this sometimes hard-to-swallow fact: getting rejections is often not about how good your book is, or whether it deserves to be published.

It’s about editorial boards weighing whether they think they can sell thousands of copies of your book — a tall order for any author. Your platform is an engine working for you to meet that goal, and all you can do is to keep growing it, a day at a time.

At the end of the day, none of this is science.

Some authors receive many rejections before self-publishing bestsellers (Still Alice, by Lisa Genova); some authors get deals based solely on their social media presence (Sh*t My Dad Says, by Justin Halpern); and some authors have no platform but manage to land book deals anyway. (Don’t look to the outliers to make a case for not attending to your platform, though.)

Platform-building is a fine balance between being authentic and pushing yourself outside your comfort zone as much as you can — but not to the point where you’re overwhelmed and paralyzed.

Take it a day at a time, and don’t be hard on yourself if you feel behind.

Next Steps

Building your platform is a marathon, not a sprint. You will get there, but it takes time.

Earlier in the article, I said that social media isn’t the only piece of the author platform pie. But when you look at the chart again and do the math, a powerful social media standing can account for:

• 10% Social Media
• 10% Contacts
• 10% Personality

And if your social media accounts prove your ability to execute over the years and show your expertise on your topic, you’re suddenly filling 70% of the pie.

That’s why it pays to take social media and platform building seriously.

**Editor’s Note** We’ve teamed up with Self-Publishing School to offer this free training on How to Explode Your Book Launch. If you’re ready to take your social media and author platform to the next level, this is the best way to do it.

This is an updated version of a story that was previously published. We update our posts as often as possible to ensure they’re useful for our readers.

Photo via Dean Drobot / Shutterstock 

But in my everyday work with authors, I’ve noticed many writers aren’t sure how exactly to get started. What should you focus on when you’re being pointed in 20 different directions, and all roads are potentially huge time sucks?

How to start building your author platform

As I explain in this post, author platform includes these components: expertise, contacts, social media, previous media, previous books, personality, existing readership and ability to execute. That breakdown can function as a roadmap for anyone who’s trying to figure out how to get started, especially if you feel like you’re starting at zero.

Ready to build your author platform? Here’s how to start from scratch.

1. Expertise: Write an “I am fabulous” statement

The goal with this step is to pump yourself up. In what specific and particular ways are you awesome? Why are you the person to write your book? Why is it the case that no one but you could write your book? What unique experience do you bring to the table?

Even if your answer is simply that you lived the life you lived — and maybe it was a hard one —  you’re awesome for having survived it. If you write fiction, your book likely involves themes or situations you know a lot about, which makes you an expert.

Let your statement be free-flowing, but work hard to pat yourself on the back. While many of us tend to undervalue our abilities, the first step toward being an expert is believing you can be an expert.

You may have to fake it till you make it, and your “I am fabulous” statement can give you the motivation and validation you need to get there.

2. Contacts: Put together a “big mouth list”

Everyone you know is a contact. The more people you know, the more influence you have, especially if you know people in high places.

So what if those influencers are a couple degrees of separation from you? People are surprising in how they choose to support fledgling authors. I’ve witnessed seriously established authors supporting new writers just because it feels good, and they remember what it’s like to be in your position.

In addition to the list of people you’re connected to, create a list of people who might blurb you, from realistic to pie in the sky. Who would be your ideal reader? Who do you dream might one day recommend your book?

3. Social media: Pick just two social channels

That’s right: only two. Set up a profile on each and post once a day.

For most writers, I recommend choosing Facebook and Twitter, but if you’re into other channels or options, give them a shot. If you’re writing something that lends itself to images, join Pinterest. If your work lends itself to video, do YouTube. Experiment to find a social media channel that works for you and your writing.

The key to social media is posting regularly and engaging people. You want shares, because shares lead to more follows. Rather than spreading yourself thin across multiple platforms, focus consistently on the two platforms that provide the most value to you and your work.

It takes forever (seriously) to build up a following on social media, so don’t be discouraged. Celebrate a few likes a week. Manage your expectations. Keep going. Building an author platform is a marathon, not a sprint.

4. Previous media and books: Publish an ebook

If you’re starting at zero, you may not have any previously published books or media, like guest posts or podcast interviews. That’s okay.

If you’re working on a book project that you know is going to take some time to complete — a novel or a memoir that’s already been in progress for a few years, for instance — then write a shorter ebook!

It’s surprisingly easy to self-publish an ebook. You want it to be high quality, with great content, a compelling cover and a well-designed interior. Using Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, iBooks, or e-junkie you can promote and sell your ebook from your website. While marketing your ebook is a topic for another post, figuring out how to write an ebook is a fairly simple process. And voila, you have a book to propel future books.

Media opportunities will come, but any interview you do, blog post you write or opportunity to speak in front of people you come across qualifies as media. Don’t be afraid to showcase these successes on your website and social media channels.

It takes a major shift in consciousness to start self-promoting, but I’ve found the key is in the balance. It’s cool to self-promote if you’re giving your readership fantastic, smart and interesting content — providing value. And it will get more comfortable with practice, I promise.

5. Personality: Figure out your persona

Jeff VanderMeer’s Booklife helped me understand the value of figuring out who you are online.

Some people put it all out there and are wholly themselves online, while others choose to create a persona different from who they are in real life or only show a certain side of themselves. You get to decide, and you’re not wrong or weird or bad if you want to retain a little privacy.

However, being private or an introvert does not mean you should not have a website, or that you can get away with pooh-poohing the importance of an author platform.

It just means you get to set boundaries. Instead of holding technology in contempt, learn to work with what you might not like, and to figure out how to make it work for you.

6. Existing readership: Create an email sign-up form on your website

What? You don’t have a website yet? OK, the first step is to set up your new site. Here’s a guide on how to start a blog.

While you’re at it, create a sign-up form that connects to an email management system; here are a few of our favorite email newsletter platforms to choose from. Put it on your homepage to capture email addresses — and take a deep breath.

Authors often tell me that people they know already have too much email. Get over it. Seriously. Your job is to collect emails, and to send out worthwhile content. It may take a long time to build up your email list, and to figure out exactly what your message is, but you need to practice having a following.

It doesn’t matter if you launch your email list with 20 people on it. That’s exactly what I did, and four years later I’m publishing for 5,000 subscribers who want to hear from me. After all, if they don’t, they can opt out.

But don’t worry about the numbers for now. Just take the first step and set up the form.

(Ready to take your email collection to the next level? Check out these 7 simple steps to build your author email list – fast!)

7. Ability to execute: Stick to a schedule

The ability to execute, like personality, is sort of a “soft” aspect of author platform, but it matters. It’s about follow-through and the ability to stick to a commitment to create content. It’s about consistency, and showing up even if it seems like no one is listening.

Building an author platform is grueling work, but it’s truly rewarding when you see the occasional spikes in engagement or new followers, or the payoff in the form of positive feedback or sales.

This payoff can only happen if you execute a plan and stick to it.

I know it’s a long haul. I’m out there myself, working on my platform every day, sometimes wondering why I am putting so much effort toward all this personal branding. But if you want to publish, and if you want readers, you have to find a voice, write content, connect with your readers and put yourself out there.

Your hard work will pay off; it just takes some time. Give it time and figure out a schedule that works for you. I recommend blogging once a month and posting on social media once a day, to start. You might increase from there, but again, you can take it little by little and adjust your plan as you figure it out.

The best way to build an author platform is simple: start

Just like you don’t run a marathon without training for weeks or months, you don’t start your author platform full force. Building your platform takes discipline and hard work, but if it weren’t worth it, no one would be doing it.

The key is to find genuine value in your endeavors. Keep going, even when it feels like no one is listening. Eventually people will start to listen, and eventually you will get a comment to a post that makes you realize you’re making a difference, reach a milestone with your contacts that surprises you, or connect with a high-profile writer who supports you just because.

Have faith. Work hard. Don’t dismiss these ideas just because they feel like too much effort, or because starting from zero seems daunting. Everyone started from zero, even your literary heroes. And it’s only with hindsight and effort that anyone has the wisdom to promise that it’s worth it.

I promise, it is. Come on in and test the waters. Wade in slowly. You’ll find your way.

What was the first thing you did to build your author platform? If you’re just starting out, what’s your biggest obstacle?

This is an updated version of a story that was previously published. We update our posts as often as possible to ensure they’re useful for our readers.

Photo via GuadiLab / Shutterstock