The Book Is Not a Destination

On being an expert, owning experience as expertise, and thinking about book(s) as one vehicle for getting content into the world

I’ve spent the weekend at the Chuckanut Writers Conference in Bellingham, Washington, which was inspiring and hello to some of my new Substack followers from this weekend! I’m sending this dispatch on a characteristically drizzly and perfectly green and lovely Pacific Northwest morning.  

After one of my talks yesterday, a participant stayed after to tell me that something I’d said earlier in the day in my “Business of Writing” class had changed her perspective. In the class I’d pushed back on a writer who wanted to insist that see wasn’t as an expert in her subject matter (mental illness). So much so that she’d recently posted a piece on Substack titled, “I am not an expert.” I suggested that she very much is an expert in her lived experience, and that her next Substack post might be titled:

The woman who’d waited to talk to me wanted me to know that she was an expert and she knew it, but she’d been too paralyzed to build an author platform. The reasons were manifold. Building an author platform is overwhelming. It’s common not to know where to start. Lots of authors think it’s too early to start building an author platform if they’re not even finished with their book, or if they’re not a published author. When a participant in class asked, “When is too early to start building an author platform?”, my answer was:

The tricky truth about book publishing is that the best way to build an author platform, short of being already famous, is by becoming a published author. A book is a door-opener. Once you have a published book under your belt, you’re seen in a different light. You’re a potential panelist, speaker, podcast guest, and yes—expert—who can speak to the topics and subjects central to your book and its messages. This is true for novelists as well as memoirists and other nonfiction writers. Novelists tend to get stalled out on platform-building because they often struggle to own their expertise in the topics they write about even more than memoirists.

On the podcast (Write-minded) I host with Grant Faulkner, we interview novelists all the time. We’re a theme-based show, so the topics we’ve interviewed novelists on include things like: the big questions; getting out of your own way; failure; the challenges of “thinking” novels; making your words matter; and so much more.

Grant and I did the closing address last night. Here we are as you will usually find us together—in front of a computer and a mic, and Grant making me laugh.

It’s imperative, as writers and authors, to understand that the book is just one of many vehicles for getting your ideas and content into the world. In my role as publisher, I often see authors having a very narrow view of what it means to be an author that looks something like this:

Write a book, publish that book, get a lot of attention for that book, then sit around and feel bad about the fact that it all ended so quickly.

The book is not a destination. You, the author, are a conversation-starter. Your purpose in having and growing an author platform is to become and be a go-to person on your areas of interest and expertise. Sometimes this requires figuring out what those areas of interest and expertise are; more often than not, though, it requires owning those areas of interest and expertise to a degree that you know your space, occupy your space, own your space.

The example I love to give students on how to do this comes from my friend Hope Edelman, whose area of expertise is the experience of of having lost her mom at an early age, and what she’s coined as “aftergrief,” which is the lasting grief we live with when we lose a loved one. This is Hope’s terrain, so when Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert had a conversation in 2019 in which they each shared the grief of losing a parent young, Hope jumped. She immediately penned an opinion piece for the New York Times. She got her op-ed placed because she owns her expertise. This is not an expertise anyone wishes to have, by the way. It’s lived experience expertise, however, and it’s immensely helpful to others, and Hope has built an entire community and an impressive author platform because she doesn’t question whether hers is the voice that should be central to any conversation about parent loss. She knows the value of her words and what she has to offer to others.

There’s a difference between writers/authors who want to publish a single book and those who want to build platforms, movements, communities, and careers from their words, ideas, and messages. If you fall into the latter camp, you have to keep on keeping on. Grow your content. Keep up the conversation. Write about your topics, subjects, and ideas on social media. Start a Substack if you don’t have one already. Jump on opportunities to do op-eds, articles, stories like Hope Edelman did. Seize your moments. After you publish, and once you’re able to, start thinking about your next book. But above all else, own your experience and what you know as expertise.

Consider that the word “expert” comes from the Latin expertus, meaning “to try” or “experience.” The dictionary informs me that an expert is someone who specializes in a subject, to the extent that they are considered an “authority.” Look at that word—authority. If you are an author, or are on your way to becoming one, you are an authority.

What do you write about? What is your expertise? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

I’m going with this: I write about writing, memoir, and publishing. I’m an expert in encouraging people to give voice to the things they care about and to get published. I’m an expert in memoir. I’m an expert in book publishing.

Join me by giving it a try here in the comments!