A Platform That Fits – an Interview with Eve Yohalem

I'm excited today to share an interview with fellow children's book author Eve Yohalem. I find the way she thinks about platform, and how she decided to work on hers, a really interesting take on what authors can do, whether published by a major house or doing it on her/his own. I hope y'all will find it interesting, too.

Full disclosure - I know Eve from a totally different context. Years back, she sang lyrics of mine, and for that I'm forever grateful, as she could turn anything I might've penned into something worth listening to. But that's a different story, since today, we're talking platform and publishing.

You've been traditionally published (Escape Under the Forever Sky from Chronicle Books), but with your new release, you did it on your own. Tell me about the choice you made to self publish.

A couple of years ago I wrote a collection of funny short stories for 6-10 year olds called GRANPA HATES THE BIRD. At the time, both my agent and my publisher told me the stories were unpublishable (ouch!). Not because they didn’t like them but because there’s no market for short stories for that age group. So I stuck GRANDPA in a drawer and moved on to other projects.

Cut to early 2011. I’m thinking about what I want my online presence to be. I had a static website with basic information about me and my middle grade novel, ESCAPE UNDER THE FOREVER SKY, and that was it. No blog, no Facebook, no Twitter, nothing dynamic. I wanted to do more, but I couldn’t decide what “more” meant.

I’m deeply uncomfortable with the idea of being publicly private and shy about reaching out to strangers online, but I wanted to be available to and engaged with readers (or their parents and teachers) and others in publishing.

I spent a lot of time looking at what other authors were doing online, trying to decide what would fit me, but fear and ambivalence kept me from doing anything concrete. At the same time, self-publishing was exploding – no longer a vanity press of last resort, but a viable, respectable, professional outlet.

I’d started a website with some friends in the early days of the Internet bubble that we sold to Monster.com, and it was easily one of the most fun experiences of my professional life. Self-publishing in 2011 looked to me like the Internet industry in the mid-nineties. I wanted to be a part of it, to follow its progress from the inside, and I just so happened to have these stories that were unsuited to traditional print publishing. Since I didn’t have a publisher behind me, I’d have to do all the marketing myself. It was just the impetus I needed to figure out the online portion of my career.

That's a great impetus. I love the way you chose to experiment rather than sitting by just wondering what might happen. So, uh, what did you figure out?

I found out I really like blogging and I don’t mind Facebook, but Twitter still doesn’t do it for me (although I haven’t ruled it out, especially since you, Greg, recommend it so highly!).

I don’t want to add to the noise that’s out there, so I only blog when I have something I think is worth sharing and not exhaustively covered elsewhere online. Which means my blog posts are more likely to be about the Milgram experiments or secret codes than they are about my writing process or some development in publishing.

I moved my whole website to WordPress and discovered it’s much easier to do all the updating myself than to go through my graphic designer. I’m even planning to do all my own technical work for my next GRANDPA HATES THE BIRD story.

Have you found that blogging and being on Facebook have been effective for you?

Yes, in the sense that when you go from nothing to something it’s a huge improvement! And, yes, in the sense that I’m comfortable with what I’m doing and I feel authentic doing it.

I engage more with readers now than I did before when the only way for readers to reach me was via an email address that they had to find on my website. I also think being on Facebook has led to some sales.

But the most exposure I’ve gained by far had nothing to do with social networking. It was offering one of my stories for free - it’s been downloaded about 10,000 times on Amazon alone.

That's exciting. I love that you offer the stories separately on Amazon, too. We could talk those aspects of what you're doing all day, but in terms of having a platform and such... do you find you promote differently for a self-published book when it comes to social media?

Not really. These days, most publishers expect authors to most of their own marketing, online and otherwise. Authors do as much as we can, every way we can think of.

Because my self-published stories aren’t available as print books, it’s hard to do school visits around them and I can’t do a Goodreads giveaway, but that’s an issue of format not of publisher. One challenge in self-publishing is getting reviews – a lot of reviewers, including mainstream reviewers like Kirkus and School Library Journal, won’t consider self-published books. But I’ve managed to find some who will.

With the benefit of hindsight, what, if anything, would you do differently?

I’d have started sooner. (Greg's note: I separated this line out to make sure everyone saw it :-))

I’d have tried blogging a year ago, two years ago. I’d have finished all my self-publishing market research this summer so that review requests went out and ad space was reserved before the books were published. The ebook market for young kids lags way behind other genres – I’m early in this space. It would have been nice to be early (or earlier!) in other spaces, too.

Many thanks to Eve for stopping by to share her experiences so far. I can't wait to see where she flies with the Bird stories, as well as seeing what else she cooks up for us moving forward. (For more interviews related to children's literature, head on over to the Teaching Authors blog for the Interview Wednesday Roundup!)

Tagged as: interview, platform