Joan Stewart writes –

Here's a typical call I get from an author.

She tells me she's aching for a major publisher to offer her a big advance for her new book. She promises to even do a fair amount of the publicity on her own, setting up interviews with radio and TV talk shows and criss-crossing the globe on book tours.

All that publicity, she reasons, will pay off because it will make her well-known and famous. There's only one problem with that scenario.

The author has it backwards.

She needs to be well-known and famous BEFORE she approaches a publisher–if she has her heart set on a six-figure book advance. That's because the publisher will want to know right up front if she has a ready-made audience that will buy her book.

It's called platform, and it's something every publishing house looks for when deciding which authors to work with. Some publishers receive as many as 5,000 book proposals a month. If yours is among them, they want to know who you know and, more importantly, who knows you. Many publishers will spend no more than a measly five seconds looking for those answers in your proposal before deciding whether it's worth tossing onto the "maybe" pile or the wastebasket.

Do you have a big opt-in list that you email regularly? Do you do lots of public speaking engagements? Are you a keynoter? Have you spoken at adult learning centers? Do you sell other products? Have you already done TV talk shows? What about the national morning talk show circuit? What does your Rolodex of media contacts look like? Have you licensed a product? Are you an expert?

They want all this BEFORE you've written your book.

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