Author: Dan Blank

This is part of the Bittersweet Book Launch case study, where Dan Blank and Miranda Beverly-Whittemore share the yearlong process of launching her novel. You can view all posts here.

by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

Yesterday I had a great catch-up conversation with Megana, my best friend from college. She lives across the country with her husband and four kids. We have the kind of long-distance intimacy in which we speak for a few hours every six months or so, and it’s as though no time has passed. Except that when it comes to books and children, six months really matter. Today I asked about her new baby, and she asked about my son, and we regaled each other with the best family tales we’ve collected since our last conversation.

Then she asked about the latest on Bittersweet. She’s not in the book biz, but she’s known me long enough to know how it works, and I was able to fill her in about the book’s foreign sales and my May pub date and the new work I’ve been doing with Dan. I threw around some lingo—namely “Author Platform”—and she stopped me right there.

“What does that mean?” she asked.

Sometimes it can be so, so helpful to go back to square one. “Okay,” I began, trying to figure out how to streamline my jumble of thoughts, “So take my Twitter account, and my Facebook page and my website. All those disparate pieces should be telling the same story about me. They should be aligned to my brand.”

“So your brand—what’s that?”

“It’s the central truth about me. The story I want to tell about who I am.”

“And what’s that story?”

I sighed as I tried to gather my wits. “My background. My thoughts about the world. What I like to read and think about. The idea is to create a consistent online self who can be trusted by those who engage with me. So that someone who reads my blog knows that when they dip in every few days, they can expect consistency—that I’ll be writing about or posting articles or entries that they will find interesting. That if they buy my book, the brand I’ve put out there will only deepen their experience of reading it.”

“And how honest is that story of your brand? What if there’s stuff about yourself you don’t want to have be part of it? I’ve noticed, for example, that your Facebook page seems less intimate than it used to be. It’s still personal, but it’s more of a public persona.”

She was getting to the heart of the beast I’ve been wrestling with—how to balance being personal, accessible and generous, while protecting my intimacy. How to weave the fabric of my life/ experience/ career into a single, strong thread that is truthful, and enticing, and relatable. How to craft my personal narrative into a marketing tool without losing myself. How to leave out the bits that don’t quite fit.

“You know who balances her real self and her persona really well? Nicole.” Megana was talking about my friend Nicole Caccavo Kear, whose forthcoming memoir, Now I See You, is due out from St. Martin’s in 2014. “Her blog is just so so so relatable. The other day I was reading a parenting book, and I remembered something she’d written about her kids on her blog, and I thought about emailing her right then and there with the advice I was reading—I would have done that even if I hadn’t met her, because her blog makes me feel like I know her much better than I do. I laugh to myself when I think about her family and her insights on parenting. And even if I hadn’t met her, I would buy her book when it comes out.”

There—right there—is an example of Author Platform doing its work. I admire Nicole’s ability to put how she really talks (with, okay, a few less swear words) onto the page. Having a conversation with her, or reading her blog, or reading her book, you come to the same conclusion: she’s funny and cynical and warm in the best ways. She is consistently herself, a self that is delightful to know. A self both Megana and I want to return to.

What bloggers/writers/websites do find to be similarly successful in striking that balance? If you have an online presence as an author, how do you balance being accessible with protecting your intimacies?

This is part of the Bittersweet Book Launch case study, where Dan Blank and Miranda Beverly-Whittemore share the yearlong process of launching her novel. You can view all posts here.

by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

Dan and I had a meeting yesterday in which, among other things, we discussed that our big job right now is to get to the heart of the story we want to tell about me. That means aligning all my social media selves– from Twitter, to Facebook, to my website. Making sure that all those versions of myself, including Bittersweet, lead back to the essential me. This is so so SO hard to do, but it’s necessary, and will be reiterated again and again over the course of this next year and beyond– I’ll be revising my “about” pages ’til the cows come home.

One of the instructions that stuck with me the most when I started the Building Your Author Platform course was Dan’s insistence that one should only start a blog about something she is passionate about. “If you don’t love to cook, don’t start a blog about cooking, because you’ll get bored and you’ll stop doing it, and not only will you lose readership but you’ll disappoint yourself” is about how he put it. I love this idea, and feel it can be applied to nearly all professional aspects of my life (and some personal too); the notion that it’s not worth putting time and effort into a website, or a social media outlet, or a book, if you don’t have the hunger to fight for it.

So I sat down and made a list of all the various parts of me that exist out there in the world, and what I came up was disparate and strange but also, yes, me. Dan reminded me that this newly aligned author platform should not exist in *spite* of my unusual childhood and a very artistic family and the mom/ writer/ cook/ maker I’ve become, but that those are the parts of me I should be putting out there, under the umbrella of my name. “You are a maker,” he said, “and I think that’s what you want to put out there in the world, because that’s your most honest self.”

Hearing it put that way felt like a celebration (and also a bit terrifying– more on the balance of terror and thrill in another post). And it made my job a little more concrete, if enormous. Should I have a blog on my website? What should that blog do? What should the tone of my newsletter be? How do I make sure the voice that appears on this blog is consistent with my editorial (and authorial) voice in the Friendstories Project?

But it’s always good to start small, right? So last night I sat down and did some thinking, and revising, of my Twitter profile. Here’s a glimpse at my revision (which will be revised, and revised and revised)…

Twitter on 7/14/13:

Current Name: M Beverly-Whittemore doesn’t come up when you google my name, but it’s the longest I can make my name on Twitter- ack. How to fix this?

Current Author Pic: This is my current headshot but it could be crisper (higher res?)

Background Pic: not up to brand- what would I imagine it to be? Eventually a cover shot of Bittersweet? Probably depends on what the cover ends up looking like. In the meantime it should be something that evokes both the feeling (and place) of Bittersweet, and also the larger “me”

Current Bio: “Novels about the American family: BITTERSWEET (Crown, June 2014); SET ME FREE (2007); THE EFFECTS OF LIGHT (2005). Brooklyn, New York * mirandabeverly-whittemore.com.” But that’s not really what I write, is it? Dan made the good point that all my books are about outsiders, people seeking a place to belong– people like me. That needs to be in there somewhere. Should I change it to: “Novels about hoping to belong(?)” or “Novels about outsiders(?)”. Also, the book pub date has been moved to May.

New Twitter (7/15/13):

Still need to get a crisper author photo in there… and maybe edit my bio: “Novels about searching to belong(?)”

This is part of the Bittersweet Book Launch case study, where Dan Blank and Miranda Beverly-Whittemore share the yearlong process of launching her novel. You can view all posts here.

I usually make a big distinction between the idea of a platform for an author, and publicity and marketing for a specific book. In other words: I care less about someone giving you $12 for a product (in this case a book), and more about the connections that happen before/during/after that transaction that truly makes our lives more interesting.

So in her last post, Miranda touched upon this, that here we are nearly a year before the book launch of Bittersweet, and we are already thinking BEYOND the book. Like, what will all of this mean in 2 or 3 or 4 years? Now THAT is what I am interested in.

Too often, I think we focus on the wrong thing. A bestseller list or book sales comes to REPRESENT the things we really hope for, and over time, REPLACE those things.

So yes, I do hope that Bittersweet is widely read, well reviewed, and becomes a bestseller. But I’m also not pretending that those are THE goals. They are a means to an end: enabling Miranda to most powerfully connect with others based on stories, and the things underlying those stories and human connections. And of course, to ensure all of this is sustainable.

-Dan

This is part of the Bittersweet Book Launch case study, where Dan Blank and Miranda Beverly-Whittemore share the yearlong process of launching her novel. You can view all posts here.

by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

As I mentioned before, I’ve been writing short pieces about my own girlhood friendships as a way to get closer to what the Friendstories project wants to be. My intention is that in writing about the best friends I had as a girl, I’ll be able to define the parameters of the project organically, and connect emotionally to the highs and lows of those particular relationships. I moved a lot as a kid, so I estimate I’ll be able to write about twenty of these, give or take; the experiences of those friendships run the gamut of funny to heartbreaking. I’ll use these twenty short pieces to provide examples to the early folks I’ll approach to contribute to the project, and, ultimately, on the website.

When I spoke to Dan a couple weeks ago about the Friendstories project, he asked me to talk again about how it connected, specifically, to Bittersweet. Bittersweet begins with a girl friendship—that of dowdy, bookish Mabel and glamorous, wealthy Ev; Mabel’s admiration of (and use for) Ev, and vice versa, is the backbone that holds up the rest of the novel. Many women who have either read or heard about Bittersweet have preemptively shared anecdotes about their own girlhood friendships. But what is it about asking others to explore their girlhood friendships that I believe will help promote my book? Of course, that’s not all that Friendstories has to do—I am also building my own brand, distinct from Bittersweet, and I want to create a community that stands on its own two feet. But it is worth asking myself that question again and again as I go on: how does Friendstories connect to Bittersweet?

Perhaps the answer lies in my own experience writing about S., my best friend and neighbor during my fourth and fifth grade years. Our friendship burned out fast and furiously, and perhaps because I moved right afterwards, it was buried deep. But in trying to write about her, I realized the memory of her—and the moment that ended our friendship—still touched a raw nerve. Some friendships burn out long and slow, but this was like quickfire, and it blindsided me. As I wrote about it, almost thirty years after the fact, I found my heart racing, my eyes filling with tears, my hands shaking on the keyboard.

That—right there—is how the Friendstories project connects to my novel. In writing Bittersweet, I have thought consistently about the honest emotion at the heart of Mabel and Ev’s murky friendship. They are each, from one minute to the next, competitive, loving, self-serving, needy, dishonest, loyal, generous, selfish; in a word, they are as close to human as I can make them. I believe that by inviting people to engage in true stories about friendships—both their own, and each others’—I will be building a readership base for Bittersweet that draws on something particularly deep in each of us, the expertise of friends we have loved, and lost, the nostalgia for that era in our lives when who we are is often defined by who we know. I love the idea of engaging future readers on that level.