| Hey, I put my hermit status on hold this week and made my first podcast appearance in forever. You can watch it on YouTube below or listen in all the usual podcasty places (links on the host page here).  I say watch but this is an audio-only podcast meaning you must stare into my beard for an hour instead and ponder how difficult it is for me to eat ramen. We had a great chat covering everything from what is working in marketing right now to the different challenges facing newer authors vs. more experienced ones looking to level up. We spoke about what has changed over the time I have been publishing and the fundamentals which never do. It was great fun and I recommend giving it a listen. So your author friends would enjoy it too, I'd appreciate it if you can share this Facebook post, or the above links. a platform to take off Over the last two weeks we have been examining those immutable marketing fundamentals – which probably don't get as much attention as they should while we are all distracted by the new and shiny thing. Or your favorite meme from 2016, I guess. The shonky rubric I've adopted is Product, Promotion, and Platform. In the first email we talked about Product, which isn't just them books, but also where you shelve them and how you present them to readers as a result. Catch up on that email here. By the way, I had a couple of people emailing to ask what they do when their pesky book crosses genres. I spoke about this a little in the podcast, if you want to give that a listen, but it's a subject worth teasing out in full in its own newsletter. (Short version: you can put your book on multiple digital shelves, yes, but you can only put one cover on it. Figure out what the true underlying genre of the book is, and what is more setting/seasoning.) In the second email we delved into Promotion – cutting through the noise and getting eyes on that book of yours. I basically flipped a common question I get right back at ya: if not ads, then what? There are plenty of promo options but only a couple that give you true scale. How you put the pieces together is completely up to you but it's wise to recognize the costs and limitations of your choices. Read that here if you missed it. Today we cover the third pillar of a sustainable career, because you need a platform to take off – which is the kind of pithy line I wish I could remember when doing interviews. turning buyers into fans The last step in this alchemical process of creating an army of superfans is arguably the most difficult. Certainly the slowest. You can't just dump money on this problem to solve it, like you (kinda) can with promotion; it's mostly a slow burn. But one that can build to a sales inferno if you are patient. It's probably the least sexy marketing topic but today we're going to change that because I finally realized how I can zhuzh it up: platform multiples promotion. Newsletters might not be sexy. "Reader engagement" certainly isn't. But you know what is? Money! Building your platform will make every promotion you run more cost-effective, and every launch more lucrative. Which is money in your pocket. And is anything hotter than money? Platforms don't just act as an accelerant to any promotion, they also give you a headstart. As any billionaire inexplicably spending all his cash on the colonization of space will tell you, putting stuff into orbit is expensive because you must burn through tons and tons of fuel to fight gravity and punch through the Earth's atmosphere. Which is why anyone worth his three commas is racing to build a shipyard on the moon. Hey, it beats feeding the poor. Anyway, the point is launching from orbit – once you can lever yourself up there – is much more economical because you don't have to burn so much fuel to launch things into space. Because you are already in space! It's not that complicated, I guess. Except for the getting into space part. The benefits of launching a book from a solid author platform are somewhat similar, give or take a few hundred billion. Here's what that looks like. your target When you have 20,000 readers on your mailing list, you can split that up over five days, hitting a meaty 4,000 readers on each day. This is a hell of a baseline before you spend a single dollar on advertising. With sales from core readers banked right after you hit Send, your ads get a helluva head start, and you have already tickled Amazon's algorithms before your ads even warmed up. It's a gold-plated headstart you can give yourself to every single launch and sale. A BookBub in your pocket that you can drop whenever you like, day after day during your launch. Assuming these are actually your readers on your list, and not some randos you have ingloriously shanghaied, then you are basically guaranteeing a powerful spike every day of your launch, and then whatever your ads deliver on top of that is just further gravy. Visibility only gets more valuable the higher you climb in the charts. Like all good capitalist enterprises, Amazon prefers to help those who are already helping themselves quite a lot; it devotes most of its push to books that are already selling well with readers. ok but like how? That's all well and good, you might reasonably reply, but where do I get 20,000 readers? I spoke about this quite a bit in the podcast as well but basically you need to pay attention to two aspects: your mousetrap and your bait. The mousetrap is your reader capturing apparatus – which I show you how to build step-by-step in my short guide Following – which is free BTW. You will get huge benefits not just from assembling all that correctly, but also by paying attention to things like deliverability in an ongoing way. Something we speak about a lot here for that very reason. (I'll have something for you soon to help with your open rates.) And in that mousetrap, you should place a tempting bit of cheese – your freebie, or reader magnet, as we like to call it. You have a bunch of options here but I recommend spending quite a bit of time thinking about what could really appeal to your target readers and coming up with something very cool, something exclusive that they can only get by signing up to your list. With that cheese ensconced in your mousetrap then it's just a case of putting calls-to-action at the back of your books (the front too, for bonus points) and then pointing some traffic at it – i.e. generating some sales. This might feel somewhat chicken-and-egg when starting out but as you build you will begin to see that it's more like symbiosis. Each launch and backlist sale grows your platform. A bigger platform then helps you put together a bigger launch or promotion the next time. What first appears to be a vicious circle becomes a feedback loop where each sales spike grows your list making the next run at the charts a little easier. "What about social media?" is what several of you asked me last week. We'll talk about where that fits in next time as I have a different approach there. In short, ads and promo sites are infinitely more effective at selling books, and your newsletter is a much better tool for the job of creating reader engagement than any social media platform. That's not to say that it can't be incredibly useful; I just don't consider it an imperative - especially in 2026. I appreciate this is a somewhat breezy take and a deep and difficult topic, but I do cover it in depth in Following and from another angle in Starting From Zero - both of which are free. If you are a more experienced author and you skipped Starting From Zero, I recommend - at the very least - jumping in and checking out Lesson 5.4. It's called Building A Monster Promo and I show you, on-screen, how I build a launch for the fifth book in a series using a baseline of a large list and then layer ads and other promo on top of that to create a giant launch. It will show you what you can build towards if you are not at that point yet, or give you some ideas on how to deploy your assets more effectively if you are. And then to go even deeper on the topic, my book Strangers to Superfans is not free - a gal has to eat - but for just $4.99 you will get a super in-depth breakdown on every stage of the process of creating an army of superfans who will go out and do the selling for you. Some authors lean more on ads. Others lean more on their platform. But attention to both can pay great dividends – especially once that platform is big enough to power into orbit. I'm off to peruse my collection of fine hams. Dave P.S. Writing music this week is Esther Rose with Wanton Way of Loving. | 
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