The Importance of Tilth
Why a great platform is a publishing superpower
My wife and I spontaneously moved to Portland, Oregon, a year ago, without realizing the strength of the gardening culture here. We are now growing strawberries, basil, squash, two types of tomatoes, and a rose (melodramatically named “Celestial Night”)—and not only did we not buy any of these plants, we didn’t even ask for them. People just gave them to us, because I guess there are somehow too many plants here? I’m not sure how it works.
So, when I think about author platform (our subject for the next two weeks), I can’t help but think in gardening terms. I’ve never liked the word “platform” to describe an author’s public visibility, social-media reach, credentialed expertise, and professional network—the word is far too inert for the constant effort it takes to build and maintain a healthy platform.
Instead, I’ve started to think in terms of “tilth.” Tilth is the quality of soil for gardening and farming. “Good” tilth is spongy, crumbly, easy to dig into, rich, damp; “poor” tilth can be rock-hard, or claggy, or sandy. (My favorite descriptor for poor tilth is “lifeless,” from D. L. Karlen’s Encyclopedia of Soils in the Environment—that perfectly sums up the intuitive, gut-check nature of judging tilth.) What I love about the tilth analogy is that building good tilth is a constant process: it requires ongoing aeration, crop rotation, collaboration with soil biota, hydration, and nutrient infusion. The same is true for a great platform: it requires ongoing effort, authentic networking, pacing of opportunities, variety of content, and leveraging of relevant expertise.
Our discussion of platform (or tilth) will take two weeks. This week I’m going to cover the elements of tilth, stretching the analogy as far as I can to give you a fresh, and hopefully valuable, framework for thinking about your platform. Next week I’ll go into more depth about each element, offering practical tips on what you can do to create good tilth for your book project.
OK but why now
Platform or tilth—whatever we call it, you might be wondering why I am covering it now, before you’ve got a book deal, or even a book proposal, in hand. You’ve just refined your book idea; why not keep the momentum going and tackle the book proposal now? I’ve got three answers for you: the simple answer, the tactical answer, and the fun answer.
The simple answer: If you think of your platform as tilth, the answer is self-evident. If you want a seed to grow with exuberance, you don’t plant it in barren, rocky soil and then go about improving the soil—you work the soil until it’s a thriving, spongy, moisture-rich bed, and then you lovingly press the seed into the ground and watch it take off. I think this analogy holds quite well for nonfiction book publishing. You may have heard stories of some authors self-publishing their book to try to boost their profile, gain the attention of commercial publishers or literary agents, and then land a traditional book deal. In my opinion, this rarely works, any more than tossing a single acorn onto a random patch of ground will result in an oak tree.
The tactical answer: Remember the “fit” hurdle from last week? In nonfiction, an excellent book idea is only half the battle; you also need to show why you are the author to write your book. The more time you spend preparing tilth that is the perfect environment for your book-idea seed, the more convincing your answer to the fit question will be. For example, I’ve been working with someone interested in writing about leadership, but their “day job” is in marketing. As a marketing executive, they already know all about the power of tilth, so they have been relentlessly growing their platform through leadership-focused social media, appearances, and the launch of their own leadership and management coaching business. When the time comes, their book project will pass the fit test with flying colors.
The fun answer: Tilth is a book publishing superpower. Remember the parade of publishing obstacles from week two, about the difficulties of landing an agent, an editor, an offer, and so on? If you build good tilth, there’s a chance you can clear those first two obstacles in a single bound: agents and editors might come knocking at your door rather than the other way round! For example, I spend four to five hours each week on author outreach, perusing bylines at various media outlets, wandering through relevant accounts and hashtags across social media, checking out annual awards and recognition lists, combing through major conference/event appearances, etc. And I’m not alone—most, if not all, agents do this to some degree.
The elements of tilth
So, what goes into building good tilth? Ask any gardener or farmer this question and you’ll likely get a different answer depending on what they want to grow. Broadly speaking, though, when it comes to literal soil, good tilth is the result of a combination of hydration, collaboration with soil biota, nutrient supply, aeration, crop rotation—and of course love and care.
We’re not growing tomatoes, strawberries, or a melodramatic rose, however—we’re growing books. So, what’s in our book-tilth toolbox? To tackle that, we need to get metaphorical. Let’s see how far I can take this tilth analogy. . . .
Hydration
When building good tilth, hydration is one of the elements you likely have strong control over. If you have a sink or a hose (and running water), you’ve got hydration sorted. In this budding analogy, then, “hydration” is 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. We’ll go into more detail next week on specific advice, but hydration works best when you focus on just one, two, or three owned communities, and put full, genuine effort into them.
Collaboration with soil biota
This one’s more intuitive: collaboration = collaboration. To build good book tilth, collaboration is essential. How big can you grow your professional network? What sorts of professional affiliations do you have? How much access do you have to media outlets, to pitch articles, appearances, guest-spots on podcasts, or other opportunities? Quality beats quantity here, so a bit of strategic thinking up front can be immensely valuable. (We’ll delve into that further next week.)
Nutrient supply
In gardening, adding nutrients such as fertilizer, compost, or manure to the soil can be kind of like an ace up your sleeve. When I planted our tomato plants, the soil I was working with was rocky and compacted, with glass and other bits of garbage delightfully sprinkled throughout. I ran over to the hardware store, bought a ten-pound bag of manure and a one-pound bag of fertilizer, mixed it into the turned-over soil, and voila—we had two happy, fully laden, tomato plants in the fall.
It's not quite that easy for book tilth, unfortunately: in this formulation, “nutrient supply” means your bona fides. These might be credentials from well-known institutions, research insights that are naturally intriguing, or some other unique expertise, formalized in some way and made publicly visible, that unlocks coverage opportunities. For example, I represent Dr. Claudia de Rham, professor of theoretical physics at Imperial College London—her PhD, her full-professor status, and her pioneering gravity research all “speak for themselves” when approaching media outlets. Another client, Andy Ellis, is a hall-of-fame CSO who worked for Akamai for twenty years and now advises several cyber security startups. It’s not an exaggeration to say that he can land almost any security-related media opportunity—his bona fides open the door for him. Don’t worry if you don’t yet have such a crystal-clear sense of your bona fides—we’ll cover a couple of other productive examples next week.
Aeration
The last two elements of good tilth—aeration and crop rotation—are more mechanical strategies than the others. Thankfully (as I try to escape from this analogy intact), they correspond to savvy “mechanical” strategies for good book tilth. “Aeration” in our case refers to the spacing of content. On the fastest-moving social-media platforms such as Twitter or Tiktok, you might contribute something every day, or a few times per week, to ensure you are popping up on people’s feeds regularly. But if you have a recurring column with an online magazine, for example, you don’t want to be writing something every day—very few people would read everything, and subscribers would likely flee under the bombardment. For longer-form content such as columns, newsletters, or podcasts, a weekly or monthly frequency will be much more effective. (I know I’m sounding like a broken record, but more to come next week!)
Crop rotation
Our last tilth element to consider is crop rotation. Here again we don’t have to bend our metaphor too far: for book tilth, “crop rotation” can refer to the variety of your contributions on social media, and in the public sphere overall. For social media, you may have heard of more mathematical incarnations of this advice: the 90/10 rule, the 80/20 rule, the 3:1:1 rule, the 4:1:1 rule, the 5:3:2 rule, ad infinitum.
The point is not to do all this math, in my opinion, but to embrace the idea that authentic social engagement has a natural mix of cultural participation, “unproductive” whimsy or meme-sharing, and self-promotional messages. The best rule of thumb is to just imagine that your social-media interactions are ongoing conversations with real people (they are, after all).
A cautionary note
I can’t talk about social media without acknowledging the double-standard hazards that come with online interaction. It’s all well and good for me, a cishet white man with Elon Musk’s haircut, to say “just be yourself online!”—the chances of me facing sustained online abuse are astronomically lower than those for women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ contributors. For those of you who are rightly skeptical of joining potentially abusive online platforms, additional initial research is invaluable, if not essential. I’ll cover some specifics next week, along with a bit more detail about big-picture crop rotation.
So there’s the big idea laid out: platform = tilth. If you happen to be a serious farmer or gardener, I imagine I’ve made several missteps above. I apologize for taking an ancient concept that likely sparked human civilization as we know it and turning it into a thinking tool for ambitious bookworms. But I’m doubling down: we’ll continue the tilth discussion next week with specific tilth tips!