13 ways authors can collaborate to grow their platform

Author collaboration is a great way to grow your platform.

There are so many authors out there looking to collaborate with other people in their space, and working together is a *much* better use of your time and energy than feeling competitive with people you admire.

The more someone reads in your genre, the more likely they are to want to read your book. Team up with other authors who are in a similar position to you and start building one another up.

You could:

• Brainstorm ideas for your individual marketing plans together
• Talk about things that have worked or haven’t worked for you
• Share or swap skills with one another
• Quote for one another’s books
• Host launch parties together
• Put on a virtual panel event together
• Create an online literary festival
• Host a podcast together
• Write guest blogs for one another
• Do live Q&As on each others Facebook or Instagram pages
• Create a joint freebie to help build your newsletter
• Host a newsletter swap, where you guest edit someone else’s newsletter with a link back to your own
• Look out for authors that are already collaborating (like Killer Women or Reading Party) and see if there’s a way you can get involved.

The list is really endless. You could chat to people individually, or create a mini author mastermind group, where you have a Whatsapp group to share ideas in.

If you plan to do something proactive to introduce your audience to them, and vice versa, once a month, you’ll soon start to see the benefit.

It’s OK to all be in romance or all have urban vampire fantasies or have quiet literary books set in the mountains in Wales. Your books will all still be unique, because you are a unique and special flower. But your readers will overlap, and by working together, you will help raise each other up.

Plus it’s more fun to work with other people on this stuff! It adds accountability, and someone to bounce ideas off of, too.

How you could reach out to writers you like and admire in your space? Could you start putting together a list of authors you’d love to work with, authors who are ranking in your category on Amazon, or authors you’ve chatted to on social media?

Generally you might want to look beyond the mega-star Sunday Times and Amazon bestsellers, but if you have a clear idea of how you’d like to work with them, and how it might benefit them, why not reach out? What have you got to lose?

Sometimes you’ll get in touch with someone and they’ll turn you down or ignore you. That’s okay! Not everyone wants to collaborate, or it might be that now’s a busy period, or they are having a bad day. Don’t take it personally.

There are always other people to reach out to, other connections to make.

How can you work together with other authors to make promoting your books more fun and more successful?

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