How to Build Good Tilth

Preparing the soil to grow a real whopper of a book

Last week was mainly a feat of analogy: I argued that “author platform” is a sterile, passive term that doesn’t have much practical value. Instead, I suggested we use the farming concept of “tilth” to think about an author’s overall public presence, credentials, and network. (As a reminder: tilth is the quality of soil for gardening and farming.)

In the farming world, building “good” tilth (spongy, rich, damp soil—even if you live in a high-rise, I bet you can picture what good tilth looks like) requires a combination of hydration, collaboration with soil biota, nutrient supply, aeration, crop rotation. In the publishing world, we can explore these elements metaphorically to help us build good book tilth, i.e. an active, authentic public profile, visible presentation of relevant credentials, and a thriving professional network.

Last week was the big idea—this week is all about application. How can you build good book tilth so that when your book is published it can grow into a real blue-ribbon whopper? Let’s tackle those tilth elements in detail.

Hydration

Hydration is simply the ability to keep soil from drying out—as I mentioned last week, if you have access to running water you have nearly full control over hydration. What do you have nearly full control over when it comes to your public presence? Your owned communities: your social media channels, your newsletter, your podcast, for example. You control your Instagram/Twitter/Tiktok/LinkedIn content, you control what you post on your blog or newsletter, or what you record for your podcast.

(I recognize that I’m not using “owned” correctly here—we don’t have a true online public commons, unfortunately, so we’re basically subject to the whims of one billionaire or another when it comes to social media. This is a huge problem, in my opinion, but it could also easily be the subject of an entirely different newsletter, so I’m sidestepping it here to keep things pragmatic.)

So, how do you hydrate well? Cultural participation is key—whichever owned communities you choose to focus on, you need to be authentic, interactive, fully present, and you need to bring something of genuine value to your followers/listeners/readers. One of my clients, marketing professor Dr. Marcus Collins, is THE expert on this. As he writes in his book For the Culture: The Power Behind What We Buy, What We Do, and Who We Want to Be (forthcoming May 2023!),

If you want to get people to move, there is no vehicle more powerful or more influential than culture—full stop. Why? Because if a product, idea, behavior, or institution becomes adopted within a community’s cultural practice, not only will they take action but they will also share it with people who are like themselves.

The good news is that there are as many ways to do this as there are online communities. Moiya McTier talks about world-building and shares cat photos and astronomy pop quizzes on Twitter and Instagram while hosting or co-hosting two podcasts (!) and a PBS show. Eric Berger covers space exploration on Twitter, weather on Facebook, and writes Ars Technica’s popular Rocket Report newsletter. I even worked with an author several years ago who was obsessed with answering physics questions on Quora, and wound up becoming one of their top contributors in the category—don’t be afraid to get creative!

All that participation brings up an important point: to best hydrate, you need to focus on one, two, or three owned channels at most. Any more than that, and you simply won’t have the bandwidth to interact in a genuine, thoughtful manner with your audience. (The gardening analogy holds up here as well: maybe you use a hose to water your backyard garden, a pitcher to water a few plants on the front verge, and the kitchen sink to water your indoor plants. What you don’t do is fill seven different mugs with water and carry them all over the place to water your plants—no one has the time for that.) So be selective here—choose the combination of just a couple owned communities that bring you the most joy and fulfillment, and fully participate in those communities!

Collaboration with soil biota

When it comes to tilth, literal or metaphorical, collaboration is essential. In the same way that fungi, soil bacteria, nematodes, earthworms, and other dirt-loving critters help to create healthy soil for plants—a large professional network, a bundle of professional affiliations, a growing set of media contacts, can all dramatically boost your public presence. (I am NOT calling your colleagues earthworms, to be clear—and even if I did, it would quickly be followed up by how valuable earthworms are to habitat health.)

As with hydration, authenticity and relevance is key here, so take some time up front to think strategically about how you’d like to expand your network before sending out hundreds of emails or messages to anyone and everyone. Seek out access to communities you don’t own, but that are clearly simpatico with your field, your passions, or even your specific book subject. There are myriad ways to do this: pitch op-eds, articles, or even a recurring column, to major media outlets; appear on podcasts; guest-write for others’ newsletters; accept productive speaking appearances; and make the most of existing professional networks and affiliations through your “day job.”

For example, I recently spoke with a journalist interested in writing a book about nature. (I’m being intentionally vague here to preserve the idea for them.) I wound up stepping aside because the journalist’s published work didn’t match the subject of the book. The good news, for that author and for you, is that this hurdle is totally surmountable by focusing on more strategic collaboration. In this case, the journalist can try to pitch more nature-focused articles with various outlets; they can reach out to nature podcasts; and they can boost their engagement with prominent nature-focused folks on their social-media channels. It will certainly take some real time and effort, but the power of authentic collaboration is well worth the work. (And of course collaboration can be joyful in and of itself!)

Depending on how large your public presence already is, you may need to start with smaller outlets and communities: independent regional media, new podcasts or newsletters, niche conferences, and so on. Even when you’re having success within your existing network of contacts, always keep an eye on the horizon to continually approach larger outlets that will build your network in valuable ways.

Nutrient supply

As a reminder, nutrient supply, in the gardening world, is fertilizer, compost, manure, and similar additives. For our purposes, “nutrient supply” means your bona fides. Last week, I mentioned two clients—theoretical physicist Claudia de Rham and former Akamai CSO and security adviser Andy Ellis—as clear examples of authors whose bona fides open all sorts of doors.

What does this mean for those of us who aren’t rockstar scientists or corporate hall-of-famers, though? First, it means that if you have credentials, by all means feature them! Mention them wherever and whenever relevant, and the more you can connect them to your other tilth efforts, the better. And if you don’t have formal credentials, unearth the informal credentials that you might already have. Another client I represent, Ryan Mandelbaum, was Gizmodo’s physics writer for a time, but they were (are!) so obsessed with birds that they kept on writing articles about them and tagging them “birdmodo” until Gizmodo turned it into a proper vertical. Now, Ryan can quite genuinely claim “Founder of Birdmodo” as one of their credentials. Or there’s Andy Saunders, author of the bestselling Apollo Remastered, who started restoring NASA photographs out of sheer curiosity and put so much time and ingenuity into it that he can now accurately be described as “one of the world’s foremost experts of NASA digital restoration.”

Aeration

We discussed “aeration” last week as the spacing of public content. If you’re on TikTok or Twitter, this is less of a concern, as those feeds refresh so quickly that even if you post twice a day (or more) you’re not going to be overwhelming anyone. That is not the case at all for a recurring column, a newsletter, or a podcast, where you should be aiming for a weekly, or even monthly, schedule to avoid inundating your audience.

This type of “aeration” is intuitive, especially if you are already on social media. But there are also larger tilth “events,” such as the announcement of a new podcast, newsletter, or online course, for which even more spacing can be helpful. Case in point: for Hook to Book, I began building the premise and outline three months before I published the first post. I sent out announcements about two weeks before the first post. That percolation time can be quite valuable to help build momentum going into the launch of that event.

This is even more important for the publication of your book down the road: book publishers will often ask that authors postpone non-time-sensitive media appearances beginning about four to six months before publication, to build up a sort of “hunger” for that author’s presence by the time the book comes out. (We’ll be revisiting this in a few months once we finish outlining the book proposal process, and get into the launch stage! Stay tuned.)

Crop rotation

Crop rotation and aeration go hand-in-hand in our tilth analogy. In the same way that aeration is all about spacing content out in a way that naturally suits how real people consume it, crop rotation is all about mixing that content to reflect how real people interact with each other. As I mentioned last week, authentic social engagement is a blend of community participation, meme-sharing/whimsy, and self-promotion.

There’s another level to “crop rotation,” however: variation of the channels through which you contribute to the public conversation. A healthy social-media channel or newsletter readership is excellent, but if you are also regularly appearing on various podcasts, are writing a column for a national or international media outlet, have penned multiple op-eds in other media outlets, and have an active speaking schedule at conferences, festivals, or other virtual or in-person events—that’s when you’ll start to get those major publishers salivating.

That said, I recognize that it’s quite easy for me to type out that last paragraph, but exceedingly time-consuming and draining to deliver on it. (I have to sincerely thank a straight-shooting author for calling me out on that; though for now I’ll keep it as an anonymous thank-you.) As with hydration, focus is important here—no one can be everywhere and do everything. Do you love participating on Instagram, running a YouTube channel, and conversing on others’ podcasts? Focus on those efforts. Do you enjoy interacting on LinkedIn, writing a newsletter, and running public workshops? Go for it. Are you having a blast running your own podcast while pitching op-eds every couple months and interacting with peeps on Twitter? Perfect. (Though you might need to keep an eye on the latest Twitter news.)

The point is, find those channels that you enjoy and that harmonize with your particular career or field, and fully engage with them. Tilth is not a one-time achievement, after which you no longer need to pay any attention to it. It requires effort, maintenance, and the ability to react and adapt based on results.

Safety and Security

As I wrote last week, all of this advice sidesteps the unpleasant reality of online life: abuse is rampant, particularly for anyone who is not a white cishet man, and can range from hateful comments to doxing, swatting, and stalking. As your platform grows, so does the probability of abuse. It can be mitigated somewhat by choosing platforms that have more robust community moderation, by hosting your newsletter or blog somewhere that gives you a substantial toolbox when it comes to blocking and reporting abusive users, or by avoiding reader comments on published articles.

But that’s only half the battle—before more actively building up your public presence, you may want to harden your overall security profile to better protect your online life. One of my favorite resources for this is Crash Override, a “crisis helpline, advocacy group, and resource center for people who are experiencing online abuse.” Their resource center is particularly valuable: http://www.crashoverridenetwork.com/resources.html. You can use their “C.O.A.C.H.” (Crash Override’s Automated Cybersecurity Helper) tool to take preventative steps such as using password managers and multifactor authentication, purchasing domain privacy for your website, scrubbing social media of previously posted personal information, and using more restrictive privacy settings on social media platforms going forward.

If you are aware of other useful online security resources, please share them in the comments—I would love to expand my collection of resources and recommendations.

A burden . . . and an opportunity

By now, you no doubt have sensed the pattern to all this tilth advice—the labor of building good tilth is never over. In a very real sense, this can feel despairing. As an author, you rightly want to focus your efforts on writing the best book you possibly can, on creating something of lasting value for the culture. The idea that you might have to post selfies on Instagram every week for the rest of your life to get that book published could well sound like one of the lesser-known circles of Dante’s Hell.

But I’m hopeful that the idea of “tilth” can reframe these efforts as something fulfilling, quite literally something full of life. Building good tilth can be an excuse to connect to communities you might not otherwise have approached (or to build those communities yourself), and those connections can surprise you in wonderful ways. I love how Jane Friedman puts it: “Your platform should be as much of a creative exercise and project as the work you produce.”

Furthermore, this constant maintenance presents an opportunity: tilth can be tackled while putting together your book proposal, and more often than not those supposedly dueling efforts actually help each other. I’ve worked with authors who developed their book ideas through their speaking events—one would literally test out single book chapters by turning each of them into a talk and seeing how well they connected with the audience. Another is building the structure of their book by looking at their most popular Tiktok videos to see which messages have the most value to their audience. Another author proposed, and is actually teaching, a course on the subject of their next book. They’ll be receiving feedback from students while they are writing the book itself.

Plus, there’s a tactical advantage to working on tilth before sending out your book proposal: to publishers, the growth of your platform is nearly as important as the size of it. In most cases, two years (or more!) will pass between your book deal and the actual publication date of the book. If you can show publishers that your newsletter subscriber base is doubling every six months, or that you’ve been landing an op-ed with a new national media outlet every few months, or that your social-media following is growing consistently, that can spark significant excitement even if your base numbers are still small.

So grow! Grow creatively, grow sustainably, grow safely—talk to your communities, trade ideas, ask for feedback, celebrate each others’ victories, build a web of allies. Just like real tilth, building metaphorical tilth takes time, so don’t get frustrated if your early efforts don’t immediately pay off. Keep at it, and they will. And my hope is that, along the way, you’ll make lasting connections with wonderful people that will enrich your life, regardless of whether they buy your book, book you as a speaker, give you a column, or subscribe to your newsletter.

Next week, we turn to The Book Proposal—that chunky document that will perfectly encapsulate your book project and then *gulp* go out to agents and publishers. In the meantime—happy growing!