I Thought Writing the Book Was the Hard Part: Learning to Build an Author Platform

I wrote a fucking book. Apparently, that was only Job One.

I Thought Writing the Book Was the Hard Part

I genuinely thought writing the book was going to be the difficult bit.

Seventy-something thousand words. Weeks of writing at ridiculous speed, followed by months of editing. Rewriting the same paragraph until I hated every word in it. Removing things. Putting them back. Removing them again.

Eventually reaching the extraordinary moment when I could look at the whole thing and think:

There. I wrote a fucking book.

Excellent.

Then came querying.

Fine. Another peculiar form of psychological warfare, but at least I understood the rules.

Find agents. Research them. Write letters. Send manuscript. Develop an unhealthy relationship with the refresh button.

What I had not really anticipated was the third job.

Apparently, I now have to become visible on the internet.

So, for the past few weeks, my ADHD brain has done what it does best when presented with something completely new:

Become mildly obsessed with it.

I have learnt about hooks. Captions. Hashtags. Algorithms. Engagement. Retention. Reels. TikTok. SEO. Whether text is in something called a safe zone.

Apparently I now have opinions about all of these things.

I have made videos.

I have built a website.

I have somehow acquired TikTok, Instagram and Facebook accounts for a woman who technically does not exist.

I have accidentally become familiar with analytics.

And because this is how my brain works, I have not gently dipped a toe into any of it.

I have apparently approached “build an author platform” with the same energy I applied to writing the actual bloody novel:

Right. I don’t know how to do this. Better learn everything immediately.

Which is how, several weeks later, I have found myself staring at graphs showing thousands of people watching something I made and thinking:

Excellent.

Followed almost immediately by:

WHY IS NOBODY BLOODY TALKING?

Because that is the strange bit.

A post gets thousands of views.

For a moment, it feels exciting. Maybe this is working. Maybe people are finding the book. Maybe this is how you begin building that mythical thing everyone calls an audience.

Then silence.

A few likes.

Hardly any comments.

Occasionally somebody presses a heart, which I now receive with the gratitude of a Victorian orphan being handed an orange.

And it is genuinely odd to be seen by thousands of people while still wondering whether anybody actually saw you.

Writing is already a strange act of faith.

You spend weeks or months making something while nobody is watching.

Then apparently you finish it and move on to making things while everybody is watching but nobody is speaking.

I was not prepared for that bit.

I know this is part of being a new author now.

And actually, underneath all my complaining, I am enjoying some of it.

I have found readers.

I have found other writers.

People have sent me genuinely lovely private messages.

Complete strangers are watching me read The Missing Chapter, which still feels slightly surreal.

But bloody hell, it is hard work.

So I am trying something different.

Rather than treating social media like another exam I have not revised for, I am going to try treating it as a conversation.

I am Mallory.

I wrote a novel.

I am querying it.

I am learning all of this as I go.

And I very clearly do not know what I am doing yet.

So if you are another writer staring at your analytics thinking:

Five thousand people watched that. Why is nobody bloody talking?

Hello.

Please talk.

I strongly suspect there are quite a lot of us here.

Are you finding the whole “author platform” thing exciting, exhausting, completely baffling — or all three?