Platform, audience, and assets
The success of any launch usually comes down to these three factors. Can you guess what they are? It's not a trick question.
Building a sustainable career requires aligning three things in a strategic way; Platform, Audience, and Assets. If you can make these three things work for you, then you’ll be on your way to reach your priorities.
Platform refers to the online or offline space where you promote, sell, and engage with your work. It’s the foundation for how you share your work with the world and includes the tools, websites, or systems that allow you to connect with readers and manage your business.
Audience consists of the people who consume your content, whether that’s watching your stuff, following your blog, engaging with your social media, or subscribing to your newsletter. Understanding your audience is essential because their needs, preferences, and engagement directly impact your success.
Assets are the tools, resources, and intellectual property you already have that can help you grow your career. These include everything from your backlist of content, your email list, your social media following, and your unique skills or experiences.
Each of these elements plays a distinct role in how you grow, engage, and monetize your work. When aligned, they create a cohesive system that supports both your creative output and business goals.
Platform: Meeting the demands of the market
Your platform, whether it’s Amazon, Patreon, your website, or social media, has its own unique demands and dynamics. Each one requires a tailored approach to content, engagement, and sales. The key to success is understanding what the platform prioritizes and how you can meet those demands while staying true to your voice and goals.
The main thing I want to get through here is that if a platform isn’t helping you grow, then there’s no reason to give them your money, time, or attention. So many people are on every platform, even when their incentives are not aligned with, or even in direct opposition with, their goals.
You should only be working on platforms that actively help you grow.
Types of platforms:
Online platforms: Amazon, Patreon, Substack, your own website, social media (e.g., Instagram, Twitter, TikTok).
Offline platforms: Live events, speaking engagements, conferences, and speaking engagements.
What makes a platform important for authors?
Visibility: Platforms like Amazon or social media provide access to a wide audience, allowing your work or content to be discovered.
Sales channels: Platforms such as your website or stores like Amazon are where can buy your work.
Audience engagement: Platforms like Patreon or a newsletter are where you can build direct, ongoing relationships with your audience, nurturing superfans who support your work long-term.
Examples:
Amazon: A powerful platform for discoverability, leveraging its algorithm for ranking books and reaching a large, diverse audience.
Patreon: Focuses on community building and deeper, more personal engagement with fans through memberships and exclusive content.
What does the platform want?
Platforms like Amazon are driven by algorithms that favor popular categories, frequent releases, and reader engagement. To thrive here, you need to write to market and optimize your work for the genres or keywords that are currently trending. In contrast, platforms like Patreon may prioritize deeper connections with your audience and regular, smaller updates that foster a sense of community. On social media, platforms reward engagement and shareable content, like creating bite-sized insights or visuals can help your work go viral.
What kind of content does well on the platform: On Amazon, consistent, niche-specific products help you show up in search results and recommendation algorithms. For Patreon, exclusive behind-the-scenes content, serialized fiction, or fan engagement polls often work best. On social media platforms like Instagram or Twitter, eye-catching visuals or quick, meaningful interactions are vital for expanding your reach.
How to align with platform expectations: To give the platform what it wants, optimize your content. On Amazon, use targeted keywords, imagery that match the expectations of your niche, and release schedules that keep your name in front of customers. On Patreon, offer tiered rewards that reflect your process, giving fans a reason to engage at different levels of commitment. On social media, post regularly, engage with your audience, and create content that encourages shares and comments, driving the platform to boost your visibility.
Differentiating between platforms
Each platform has different requirements for success. For example:
Amazon requires a focus on keywords, hitting niche expectations, and release frequency.
Patreon is about nurturing community with regular, exclusive content.
Social media is driven by engagement metrics, frequent posts, interactive content, and shareability.
Tailoring your approach to fit the specific platform you’re using can maximize your success. Entrepreneurs often make the mistake of trying to apply the same strategy across platforms, but recognizing and adapting to each platform’s demands can dramatically improve your results. I recommend 1-3 platforms, expanding beyond that only when you are estabished on your previous platforms.
Audience: Aligning your content with reader needs
Types of audience:
Super fans: These are the types of people who will fly to meet you or spend $100 on a high-end prroduct.
Core audience: Your most loyal customers or superfans who engage with your content regularly, buy your new releases, and advocate for your work.
Casual readers: Customers who may have bought from you 1-2 times, but aren’t deeply invested in everything you release.
Potential customers: People who fall within your target demographic but haven’t yet discovered your work. These are customers you aim to convert into fans.
Why Understanding Your Audience Matters:
Targeted content: Knowing what your audience loves allows you to tailor your work to meet their preferences, increasing the likelihood that they will buy and recommend your work.
Engagement: A clear understanding of your audience helps you build strong relationships through direct engagement, offering them content they’re eager to support.
Marketing efficiency: When you know your audience, your marketing becomes more focused and effective. Instead of casting a wide net, you can reach people who are most likely to become loyal customers.
Examples:
Romance readers: If your audience is primarily romance fans, they may expect certain tropes like happily-ever-afters, and knowing this helps you write and market accordingly.
Newsletter subscribers: These are people who have given you their contact information and have expressed a deeper interest in your work, making them a valuable group to nurture for long-term success.
Your audience has specific needs, preferences, and pain points. As an author, your success hinges on how well you can align your content with those desires while considering the platform’s demands.
What does my audience want?
Your audience could want different things depending on where they engage with you. For instance, customers on Amazon are often looking for the next quick fix, consistent quality, or products that fit needs. On social media, your audience may be looking for updates on your process, personal engagement, or sneak peeks of upcoming projects.
How does this align with the platform’s needs? Your challenge is to align what your audience wants with the platform’s mechanisms. If your customers want updates on your journey, Patreon is a great platform to offer behind-the-scenes content. If your customers are looking for consistent new releases, Amazon’s algorithm will reward you for frequent releases. On social media, timely posts and interactions keep your customers engaged and can help build buzz for new releases.
Creating a feedback loop: Consistently engaging your audience allows you to understand their changing needs. Use surveys, beta testers, or email list engagement techniques to see what they want and how it aligns with your platform. For instance, if you notice that customers are highly engaged with certain types of updates, you can double down on those types of content to enhance both audience satisfaction and platform performance.
Tailoring for Different Audience Stages: Newer entrepreneurs may focus more on building their audience by offering free content or engaging on platforms like Wattpad or social media, where discovery is easier. Established entrepreneurs, on the other hand, might focus on monetization by launching higher-priced products, exclusive content, or more personalized interactions.
Assets: leveraging your unique strengths
You have assets beyond just the products you ship. These include your mailing list, social media following, your back catalog of goods and servies, or even your personal story. Your assets are the tools that help spur your success and grow your reach beyond your core audience.
What assets do I have?
Your assets could include:
A robust email list: A direct line to your customers that you own, which allows you to promote new releases, offers, or collaborations without relying on platforms.
A backlist of books: Multiple titles that allow you to leverage different parts of your catalog, bundling books, running sales, or promoting lesser-known works.
A strong social media presence: This is where you can engage fans, run promotions, and drive traffic back to your website or Amazon page.
Personal experience or expertise: If you have unique insights or a niche area of expertise, this can be a powerful asset, especially when building a thought leadership platform or writing non-fiction.
Why Assets Are Crucial
Monetization: Assets like your backlist or email list can be leveraged to generate income, whether through book sales, memberships, or exclusive content.
Growth: By leveraging your assets strategically, you can expand your reach and increase your visibility across platforms.
Audience engagement: Assets like exclusive content, bundles, or direct access through email make customers feel more connected to you, which encourages loyalty and repeat purchases.
How can I leverage these assets to reach beyond my core audience?
To grow beyond your current audience, consider how you can leverage what you already have:
Collaborations and partnerships: Use your network to team up with other brands or influencers in your genre. This can introduce you to new customers while also enhancing your credibility.
Cross-promotion: Utilize your backlist by cross-promoting new releases with older works. For instance, you can offer discounts on previous products when promoting a new release or offer exclusive bundles to your email list.
Scaling your brand: If you have a strong email list or a loyal social media following, consider launching exclusive products, like limited edition signed books, merchandise, or even offering workshops or coaching.
Growing your assets over time
Continue nurturing your assets by:
Building your email list: Use lead magnets like free content or exclusive releases.
Strengthening your social media: Be consistent and interactive, offering unique insights that make people want to follow you.
Refreshing your backlist: Update old products, run promotions, or reformat for new platforms to keep older works generating revenue.
Common pitfalls to avoid
Entrepreneurs often make a few key mistakes when aligning platform, audience, and assets. These include:
Neglecting platform demands: Not optimizing your work for the specific platform, such as failing to use relevant keywords on Amazon or not engaging regularly on social media.
Ignoring audience needs: Focusing too much on what the platform wants without keeping an eye on what your readers are asking for.
Underusing assets: Failing to leverage existing assets like your backlist, email list, or social proof (e.g., reviews and testimonials) to grow your reach.
Measurable action steps
To align these three elements, here are some concrete steps you can take:
Platform optimization: Choose two key platforms and optimize your content (e.g., update keywords on Amazon, increase social media engagement). Track your progress monthly.
Audience feedback loop: Send out a survey to your email list or social media followers and adjust your content strategy based on the feedback.
Asset leveraging: Run a promotion using your backlist or cross-promote your new release with older works to boost sales across your catalog.
Growth goals: Set specific growth targets for each asset, such as increasing your email list by 20% over the next six months or doubling social media engagement through regular posts.
To thrive as an entrepreneur, you need to think of your platform, audience, and assets as interconnected parts of your overall strategy. Understanding the demands of the platform helps you tailor your content to what will succeed, while knowing your audience ensures that you meet their needs in a way that aligns with the platform’s strengths. By leveraging your assets strategically, you can amplify your reach beyond your core audience and build a sustainable author career.
When you align these elements, you create a system where each part supports the others, allowing for growth, engagement, and monetization to happen in a balanced, sustainable way.
There a lot of questions for this part, but they boil down to:
What platforms do I want to focus on?
How can I gather my audience?
What assets do I need to make best use of my platform and audience?
Case Study
We all want to have a huge book launch, right. What if your launch isn’t a banger, though?
People ask me about this all the time when it comes to Kickstarter and I always tell them that you’re going to have bangers and you’re gonna have duds throughout your career. I know I have had a ton this year alone.
This graphic is the last four campaigns I’ve run under my account. All of these were launched in the last six months, yet ranged from $1.8k to $26k in funding, from between 60-800+ backers.
The one at the top left right now is live right now and its the worst launch we’ve had since at least 2021, and maybe as far back as 2016.
Meanwhile, our last launch for How to Build a World Class Substack went gangbusters raising $18,348 from 768 backers…
…and it ended less than 48 hours before this one launched!
“Of course it did, Russell,” you might say. “It’s a Substack book from Substack issues propelled by Substack…”
…and like, yes. It had a hook.
Shockingly, books that have hooks do better. Everything you launch should always have a hook if you want it to do well. Claire Venus and I had a great hook for this book, just like Monica Leonelle and I had a great hook for our Direct Sales Mastery for Authors launch that ended in January, raising over $30k from 715 backers.
I don’t always have good hooks, though. The last project I launched before the Substack book didn’t have a great hook except that I wrote it. It was a stone cold bummer, a metaphysical book, and narrated by an angel, while also being esoteric and inaccessible for most people. The fact it raised any money at all is a minor miracle.
By the way, this book launch ended on May 16th, exactly two months before the Substack book launched, and 4.5 months from the Direct Sales Mastery for Authors campaign. Yet, it raised a fraction of a fraction of those campaigns.
I still think it did fab for a tiny little book, raising $5,233 from 227 backers, but it didn’t get beyond my existing audience.. My audience ended up liking it more than I thought, which is great, but it didn’t break into that next level.
What do I mean by levels? Well, if you’re looking at campaigns I generally think that:
A good campaign is 100 backers
A great campaign overall is 200-300 backers
An amazing is 500+ backers
An elite campaign is 1,000+backers
So, it was a great campaign, but it wasn’t amazing, which is about where my worst campaign landed until now. Before Time is a Flat Circle, we launched a NSFW comic on Kickstarter and it blew up. 822 backers pledged $26,604 to fund that campaign.
This one ended less than a month before the Time is a Flat Circle campaign began. Again, we designed the project that way from the jump, taking into account platform, our own audiences, and our assets.
I could go back years and years and show you projects that blew up and others that fizzled, and it almost always comes down to three things:
Platform: What are the demands and needs of the platform as a whole, and what kind of thing tends to do well there? How can we give the platform what it wants to succeed?
Audience: What does my own audience want, and how does it align with the needs of the platform?
Assets: What assets do I have to help spur this success along to get it beyond my core audience?
Notice…I still launched all these books even when they had a small audience and terrible hook, but I went in with my eyes wide open. I planned for them to be duds and they were duds.
Nothing I ever teach will tell you not to launch the book of your heart, but if you know what to expect you won’t be surprised. Imagine what would happen if I thought this launch was going to raise $20k. I would be devastated instead of resigned to the fact.
That doesn’t mean I’m not disappointed. Would I have loved my weird metaphysical novel to go gangbusters? Yes. Was there any logical reason to assume it would? No. Would it have been absurd to think that it would? Absolutely.
Why? Because the platform didn’t have a need for it and my audience wasn’t hungry for it. Additionally, I didn’t have any assets that could get it out beyond my core audience. Even then, it only serviced a small segment of them.
Meanwhile, with the Substack book we had:
Platform: A relatively niche audience without a lot of material on how to succeed on it, where people are hungry to learn about how to use it better.
Audience: Over 50,000 readers between the two of us that want to use the platform better. This book serviced almost all of them.
Assets: Dozens of successful publications that we could partner with in order to expand our reach beyond just what we could reach on our own. Plus, we hosted a virtual conference to bring even more attention toward the book and filled it with popular Substack personalities.
The same thing is true with Death’s Kiss.
Platform: People on the platform like NSFW books, and they tend to pay top dollar for them.
Audience: My audience loves comics and Kickstarter, SK Prince’s audience loves romance. Everyone likes sex.
Assets: We had a marketing budget for Facebook ads, plus a publisher helping push us forward.
That’s mainly why we coach people to keep their smaller campaigns shorter than the bigger ones. It’s because we have more assets to deploy and we need time for the book to gather steam.
If you have assets like podcast appearances, advertising, affiliate promotions, or other things to drop during your campaign that can keep your hype train going, great. If you don’t, probably 21 days is the longest you should run a campaign, and maybe even as little as 10-14 days.
This is because with the smaller launches, there is no steam to build. All you have to do is hype up your own audience, and that’s pretty easy. Granted, this is easier for me because I have a list of almost 20,000 people who like my fiction work and 44,000 that like my non-fiction work.
But the process is the same.
If you have a smaller audience and want to go viral, then you should make sure you launch something that meets the platform’s needs and brings together a lot of assets.
Yes, with a bigger audience you have a higher floor and a higher ceiling than you do with your launch, but you can still go gangbusters if you hit the platform needs and gather assets right. Generally, with time comes a network and audience that can help move your launch along, but that’s not universally true.
At the beginning you might not have the help of your own audience, but that doesn’t mean your launch is destined to fail, especially if you figure out those other two bits. Meanwhile, if you release something that doesn’t fit platform needs and isn’t built to maximize outside assets, there’s almost nothing you can do to create heat for your project.
Unfortunately, this launch is basically dead in the water. Hopefully we can break even on costs, but we probably won’t.
Notice, this has nothing to do with the quality of the work. All four of these projects is equally high quality, and yet they vastly range in how much they raised…
…even though they were all released within six months of each other.
How much a project raises has almost nothing to do with the quality of the book.
Even if you think you hit the platform needs and assets perfectly, they are always a moving target. What the platform wanted last week could vary drastically from what it wants tomorrow. The only thing you can control is the quality of the work you produce. If you love the work, the rest will work out how it works out. Sadly, there’s little I can do with this launch because not enough people care about it.
Some people do, and that is incredible. The fact that anyone resonates with the weird things that come out of our brains is incredible. I will never take that away from them, but there are things that happen when masses of people care at scale.
When people care they share, they back, they hype it up, they get off the fence when you contact them with additional information. That effect cascades out into your marketing and brings more people to the campaign. When enough people care, their effort extends beyond your own audience.
Since there aren’t many people who care about this book, it’s impossible to create critical mass to get the hype train to build up enough speed to break through the morass.
If I didn’t have another launch coming up, I would push this launch really hard, but I do, so I have to pick my battles. I still love this book as much as my other work. I still believe you will love it if you read it. All this tells me is that not enough people believe that to make it a hit.
I’ve done this so many times for myself and other people that I can pretty well predict how successful your launch will be based on platform needs, your audience, and your assets alone.
Yes, we can influence it slightly, but probably your effort is better spent developing something new than pushing that boulder up a hill.
What do you think?
How do you plan your launches?
Do you have the same violent swings in your own launches?
Let us know in the comments.
Is that Time is a Flat circle novel for sale somewhere? That looks good to me but searched Kindle store and it didn’t come up.