Platform for Postmoderns, Part One and a Half

Welcome to Loud Time. If you read part one of this series and you came back to see who I'm going to vilify today, I apologize for setting the bar so low in my first post. I came into this series not to bury baby boomers--especially those who have framed our expectations for how we make our messages known--but to begin an inquiry into how the rest of us can be ourselves in the emerging environment we find ourselves in, and yet still make contact with steadily increasing numbers of people with the message we think they need to hear. In other words, I came into this series to give all of us a place to talk about platform for postmoderns.

If that sounds good to you, welcome to part one and a half, wherein I offer some caveats.

Here's what I'm not saying.

I'm not saying that I've cracked the code for building a fool-proof platform. If you're looking for a short cut to material success, keep looking.

I'm not saying (specifically in my previous post) anything of any kind about Mike Hyatt's character. I'm sure he's a great guy, and there's much of value in his writing. My critique of the modernist cult of platform is not an attack on people but a critique of the game, the rules of which both Hyatt and I have had to play by on a daily basis by virtue of working in a platform-dependent industry, the rules of which all too often we accept uncritically.

I'm also not saying that postmodernity is inherently more virtuous than modernity. Narcissism, materialism, isolation and dehumanization are not in and of themselves artifacts of an era; in my book Deliver Us from Me-Ville I argue in fact that cultural narcissism is central to the human story, and isolation and dehumanization are among its byproducts. Getting a message out effectively and with integrity continues to be a challenge in this postmodern age, and more particularly so by virtue of the lingering dominance of modernist assumptions about the world.

I'm also not saying that baby boomers are bad people, or past their prime, or anything like that. Some of my favorite people are baby boomers. I was feeling snarky when I wrote that stuff. Sorry.

I'm also not saying that what I'll be discussing in this series is purely postmodern in its entirety. I'm not a trained philosopher, so I'd be quickly out of my depth if I tried to explain the breadth of contemporary thought and the thinking that it's gradually supplanting. Neither am I an anthropologist, so I'd be wasting my time and yours to try to paint a precise portrait of the postmodern cultural shift. "Postmoderns" is, for the purposes of this series, a convenient catch-all, with a nice alliterative garnish.

Insert additional caveats here.

Here's what I want: I want to develop and implement a perspective on platform that honors what we've come to recognize as weaknesses in the structures and systems of modernity. I want to explore a strategy for message-building that is more communal, more participatory, more resistant to the problems I identified in my previous post. Mostly, I want to figure out how to amplify the voices and extend the reach of my friends who are themselves "postmodern," who have messages and visions that merit broad adoption and who would feel and look ridiculous dedicating inordinate time to head shots, web optimization and other platform vanities--who would, in fact, by doing so be distracted from their important work.

Some of what I develop here will be a critique of how postmoderns are currently developing and advancing their messages. There may well be points along the way where they could stand to be more modernist, or where they're putting their energies in things that are ultimately self-indulgent rather than message-enhancing. I will, of course, share my own experiences both of wasting energy and of desperately promoting myself and losing myself in the process. When it comes to the platform game, in the words of Thomas Merton, "the human race . . . is no more and no less ridiculous than myself."

Final caveat: I don't actually know what I'm talking about. My success in building a platform (as conventionally understood) is a mixed bag. I've had three books (two and a fifth, if you go by word count) published conventionally, and I've contributed to a few more. I've had a regular column at a longstanding web magazine for a few years now, and I frequently contribute pieces to a variety of print and online media. I regularly get invited to speak at a variety of events; I have a high friend count, a growing follower count and a decent Klout score. But my books sales have been nowhere near bestsellers, my speaking engagements are generally modest, and I'm often not paid for what I write or what I say. I have a full-time job; my writing and speaking are not by any stretch my primary means of self-support.

That, I think, is my first plank in a postmodern platform. When I was raising funds (unsuccessfully, it turns out) to help build a network of youth ministries, I decided that if I really think something is important, if it's really worth doing, then it's worth doing for free. It's also worth getting paid to do, of course; but your passion has value that extends well beyond the marketplace. We live in a world that is paradoxically drowning in opportunity and incredibly limiting. Hundreds of thousands of people audition every year to be the one American Idol. Anyone can publish a book at any given moment, and that book immediately gets lost in the pile of half a million other new books. The entire thing is absurd, and we're all indulging in the absurdity. The empire has no clothes. The first rule of platform for postmoderns? There is no platform.

OK, enough caveats. On with the series. Next up (I think): If you want to build a platform, first you must plant a tree. In the meantime . . .

What are you hoping I cover in this series on platform for postmoderns?

What caveats have I missed?

Share some of your frustrating experiences in your attempt to build a platform for yourself. Go ahead--it's a safe place.

Platform for Postmoderns: Embracing Abundance

This is the latest in a series on platform for postmoderns. Find previous posts (in inexplicably nonsequential order) here. The first post can be found here.

***

There's a fundamental logic underlying free market capitalism: every equation is zero-sum. For you to make something the world wants or needs, someone else will be forced to not make something else. For every sale you get, someone else loses a customer. For your star to rise, someone else's star has to fall. There's a finiteness to the world; only so much of everything exists, and so only so much of anything can come into being.

It's hard to argue the logic of that premise. The whole notion of environmental responsibility is based on the understanding that oil and carbon and topsoil and water are finite. Put a five-person family in a three-bedroom house and more than one person is going to be sharing a room. Every budget has a fiscal cliff. Even the days of our lives are numbered; as Moses once wrote, "Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away" (Psalm 90:10). Pardon my French, but Moses was a bummer.

And yet we are continually inspired to reject the limitations of time, space, money, power. Indeed, it's in defiance of such limits that nearly all innovation emerges. The Wright brothers defied the apparent restriction of gravity, the previously unassailable logic that we are bound to the earth. A few decades later and we're floating freely in space. Arguably as inspiring as Moses' words above are sobering, are Robert Browning's words describing the ache to create, to do an altogether new thing: "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what's a heaven for?" Browning rejects the notion of scarcity that undergirds modern economics; his universe is endlessly abundant.

Moses himself rejected scarcity, actually, even as he was lamenting the limitations of time. He found drinking water in a desert, for pete's sake. And when his lieutenants complained to him that other Israelites were daring to give direction to the people of Israel during the exodus from Egypt--a zero-sum platform grab if ever there was one--Moses countered with an appeal to abundance: "“Are you jealous for my sake? I wish that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put his Spirit on them!” (Numbers 11:29). In Moses' ideal world, everyone had power and wielded it well; everyone had, in fact, everything they needed and nothing they didn't.

That's the fundamental fallacy of a platform mentality shaped by scarcity: that, responsibly handled, there isn't enough of everything for everyone; that to wield influence, one needs to be elevated above everyone else; that for a platform to be effective, it must tower over and even undercut all other platforms. That's not how it plays out in practice, of course: Rick Warren and Bill Hybels, two international church leaders whose platforms were constructed under a modernist paradigm in a free market economy, aren't to my knowledge out to destroy each other. But the assumption underlying the modernist platform strategy presumes that you and I have time and attention and even loyalty enough for only one of them; they are in fact competing with each other for you. More to the point, if you have a message to disseminate--about marriage, for example--you're in head-to-head conflict with massive marriage brands like Les and Leslie Parrott, and John and Julie Gottman. You may as well give up now, because you don't have a fighting chance.

Postmoderns have seen the destructive quality of competition over limited resources in oil-based wars, slave labor and planned obsolescence. Meanwhile, they have grown up with technology that makes everything imaginable available at the touch of a button. Given these experiences, the notion of competing with someone in order to share something with everyone is preposterous. Postmoderns don't enter into competition with people who are interested in the same things; they enter into generative relationship with them. For the postmodern, there is plenty of room at the table, and a smorgasbord of ideas yields a feast of new insight--a vastly different image from the modernist vision of a marketplace of ideas, where supply supposedly drives down demand and only the fittest survive.

Of course, businesses that traffic in platform (publishing, for example) operate in a modernist economy still driven by scarcity, and so they continue to play by the rules of the modernist paradigm. Self-sustaining institutions are usually the last to convert to emerging models. But a new economy, a new paradigm, is possible; the pursuit of platform in an age of abundance requires merely that we think outside the box.

One way of doing so is to disseminate freely--to scatter ideas like seeds in whatever medium is available at any given moment. I write on blogs, for example, because I'm interested in getting an idea out there, to see how others interact with it. You can read what I write here freely, and you can comment as often as you like. We might think of a blog as an outpost in a war on competing brands, I suppose--by posting regularly we draw the attention of an audience away from some other platform and toward our own. But we don't have to think of it that way. We can instead think of it as what it is: one of many social media that is peculiarly conducive to idea sharing and generative conversation. We might think of it, in other words, as what we're bringing to a common table. This view of platform is less mercenary than the old regime's, and it syncs up nicely with a postmodern world in which playing well with others is a high value.

Any common table calls for people to gather around it, and so part of the task of building a postmodern platform is to announce the abundance, to find conversation partners and cultivate the conversation. Publicity, marketing and even sales are still part of this emerging economy. These things are done broadly, as you make scattershot announcements about new content as it goes live and offer incentives for people to engage your content; they are also done narrowly as you engage individuals with your content, commenting on their content and inviting them specifically to critique and build on what you've done. You make space in small and big ways for the conversation you want to take root and grow. You take responsibility for keeping the conversation vital and useful. And gradually you find that you've become a go-to voice in a can't-miss conversation. You've got yourself a platform, and nobody else had to suffer for it.

This approach to platform takes time, obviously. But contrary to Moses' lament, just like everything, there's plenty of time to go around.

Platform for Postmoderns, Part Three: Building Coalitions

No man is an island. No book is a solo effort. No movement is an isolated incident.

Much noise has been made in recent years about "tribes." Broadcasting is out; narrowcasting is in. Affinity groups are the new mass market. Even the notion of platform, the subject of this series (see the first three entries here, here and here), functions on the underlying assumption that you can't please everyone, so you'll have to find people who are pleased when you please yourself. Or something like that.

The object of the game, in book publishing and other celebrity-based industries, has been to identify a group and climb to the top of it. There's a certain type of person who considers James Franco, for example, the greatest actor of his generation. Lady Gaga has assembled millions of "little monsters" to sit at her feet. In my field, Christian publishing, there are John Piper Christians, Rick Warren Christians, Rob Bell Christians and Joel Osteen Christians, proof positive that white men aren't entirely homogenous. (Well, maybe not proof positive . . .) Such huddled masses need leaders, and these folks and their equivalents in other demographics have seen the opportunity and taken it.

The problem with celebrity is that it's unsustainable. I've had recent gossipy conversations about people who have "left their platform," either by choice or under duress, and whose cultural power dissipated almost overnight as a result. "The phone stops ringing," my friends lamented on behalf of our other friends; that's what happens when a musician dares to experiment with another genre, or an actor makes one too many inaccessible films, or when an author or speaker or otherwise celebrated cultural leader ventures beyond the acceptable scope of their cultural leadership. We are past the age of tyrants, after all; we enjoy whatever platform we have by the consent of the governed.

The consent of the governed, in the case of cultural celebrity, is especially fickle. And so even when we do everything right--when we play by all the rules in Michael Hyatt's book Platform--our platform can collapse underneath us. In a free market economy there's always someone, something around the corner waiting to shove us off our perch, vying to capture the imagination of our tribe. For every iPhone there's a Galaxy waiting in the wings; for every Lady Gaga a Ke$ha; for every Prayer of Jabez a Your Best Life Now. We find out quickly, tragically, that whatever love we felt from our audience was actually only lust. We thought we heard them say, "I will always love you," but in reality they had only promised "Here we are; now entertain us."

Celebrity is unsustainable not only thanks to these external factors--the loss of lofty position or the abandonment of your audience--but also thanks to what celebrity costs. Platform can be all-consuming, leaving precious little emotional energy or even chronological time to devote to more homespun, mundane things like maintaining a relationship with your spouse or your kids, your parents or your siblings, your friends and neighbors. Even your vocation--the presumed touchpoint between you and your tribe--competes for your attention with your platform. You can be so busy telling other how they can change the world like you did that changing the world becomes the lowest priority on your to-do list.

When platform is understood through the lens of celebrity, everybody loses. Three of the four Gospel writers report these wise words of Jesus: "What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?" In retrospect, as we watch modernity wind down, we are forced to ask also, What good is it for the world?

A postmodern platform must learn some hard lessons from the unsustainability of the modernist, celebrity-based platform. These lessons are hard because they involve the ego, and our egos don't like to learn lessons. But here's the essence of it: In a postmodern world, building an isolated, individual platform is a waste of time. The logic doesn't play out. Instead of building platforms for themselves, postmoderns who have a message or a vision they want broadly disseminated should concentrate on building coalitions.

A coalition is like a union. Like-minded people recognize that their common goals can be more efficiently accomplished, their voices better heard, if they speak in unison and stand together. Their common goals are discovered together rather than dictated from a single leader; their leaders are, in fact, designated from below as being particularly equipped to carry their message to the halls of power. A coalition can change things were an individual can't.

Most platforms under the modern paradigm are already coalitions, to be honest. Hyatt acknowledges in his book the team that stands behind the coherence and volume of his message, from editors and designers to administrative assistants and the like. Read the acknowledgments in any book and you'll see that it takes a village to raise an individual's voice. What's been obscured in that approach to coalition building is that the various players in any platform are there voluntarily; in a free society, in a free market economy, they can always stop doing what they're doing, and go do something else. Even some of the members of these modernist villages don't realize how free they are, how much of their freedom they've surrendered to the agenda of the person they've placed on a platform.

But a real coalition is communal all the way down. Each individual participant is there voluntarily and knows it; they've not only embraced a vision but contributed to it, in meaning and money and sweat equity. Therein lies the value: the platform is the thing that people have built; the message is part of the infrastructure of the medium by which it is amplified. The audience is already invested--not just enough to consume the message but to repeat it, to become ambassadors for it. The platform's viability is liberated from celebrity and grounded in a communal vision.

Coalition building is how governments work; it's how unions work; it's how movements work. Coalition building is how anything with longevity works. When Jesus began his public ministry, he didn't build a website; he built relationships with twelve people whose priorities overlapped but occasionally clashed. He traveled with them, ate with them, talked about grand ideas with them. By the time of his crucifixion they recognized that they were just as vulnerable to the hostility of the state and the religious authorities as he was, so they hid in an upper room. By the time of his ascension they recognized that they were just as responsible for the propagation of Jesus' message as he was, and so they went about doing greater things than Jesus did (John 14:12) and millennia later his followers are still delivering Jesus' message to the ends of the earth.

How do you build coalitions? It takes time--time to understand your own priorities and subject them meaningfully to the priorities of like-minded others, so together you can arrive at something that all involved can invest themselves in. It takes humility--a willingness to recognize that you're not the only person who cares about your subject matter, not the only source of good ideas. It takes mutuality and graciousness--a willingness to share stages and ideas and not worry so much about credit. It takes great self-awareness of both your potential and your limits, and it takes the courage to push yourself on both.

The payoff is really good. You'll have a platform that not only you but people you admire and trust can stand on and deliver an important message to the world. You'll have a dedicated space that is maintained not by force of individual will but by aggregation of great people. You'll be able to dispense with all the artifice and soul-sucking loneliness that comes with a celebrity-based understanding of platform. And you'll make a lot of friends and share a lot of love.

Some well-built coalitions I like and see great potential in:

Red Letter Christians
The Parish Collective
Forge Missions Training Network
The New Monasticism
Missio Alliance
Christian Community Development Association

There are others, of course, and you're welcome to mention those you like here. But the main idea is this: You are wasting your energy and subverting your message if you go it alone. The age of celebrity is dying and needs to be allowed to die. A better future will come as people marry their messages to the messages of others, and platform becomes not a proprietary place for individuals but shared space for great ideas.

Keep checking back for more thoughts on platform for postmoderns.

Platform for Postmoderns: Self-Promotion and Self-Loathing

This post is part of an occasional series on platform. Read the first entry here. Find the whole series (on shuffle!) here.

***

As intriguing an intellectual exercise as I find this series on platform to be, the fact of the matter is that it's only really interesting to people who have something to sell. It may be a book or a song or a film; it may be a set of skills or a big, revolutionary idea. It may be something you're not selling for money; maybe you're looking for converts or cobelligerents. Michael Hyatt, whose book on platform got me started on this series, talks about "wow products" and experiences as a priori to the work of building a platform: If you don't have something worth wowing over, why on earth are you trying to get in people's faces and on their radar?

So, if you're interested in platform--space you carve out for yourself that draws people's attention to you and helps them focus on what you're trying to say or do--you're probably interested in selling something. (If you're not interested in selling something but you're interested in platform, you may need to read this book.) To enter into the work of building a platform means--inevitably, unavoidably, unabashedly--to engage in self-promotion.

The notion of self-promotion sickens a lot of people; it petrifies a lot more. I've had people agonize with me over self-promotion while simultaneously promoting themselves to me. It feels wrong to do it; it feels exploitative of our friends and family and conversation partners. It feels slick and smarmy and dirty. It feels like we imagine selling our soul must feel.

And yet when it works, it feels sooooo goooooood.

Postmoderns are natives in a world steeped in advertising. Prior to the twentieth century advertising was primarily descriptive: this product does this and doesn't do that. Only carnival barkers over-promised, and they usually got run out of town on a rail. But you knew that had to end; advertising had too much in common with evangelism, and evangelism only works as a big, big sell. Richard Dahlstrom tells the story of how Coca Cola advertisers mimicked the missionary enterprise and changed advertising from description to proselytization:

After Asa Chandler purchased the coca-cola formula from a pharmacist in 1887, he cast a vision to his sales team, declaring that this product should be, “a thirst quenching, heaven-sent drink; a blessing to this sun-parched earth.” Chandler was a Methodist who began his sales meetings with prayer and ended his training weeks with the whole team singing stirring renditions of “Onward Christian Soldiers.”

Think about that: advertisers were now soldiers, aping Christian missionary zeal, convincing themselves that their product was "heaven-sent," authorizing themselves to foist Coke on the masses by any means necessary. And Coke was just the first domino; advertising very quickly became a matter of over-promising, tying the wow product to the existential angst of the consumer--selling the sizzle rather than the steak. Asa Chandler saw himself as a missionary for Coca Cola, but he, and now we all, became carnival barkers writ large.

A hundred and twenty five years later, we are steeped in this kind of hyperpromotion. You can't take five steps in a modern economy without being sold something, whether it's a make and model of car or the sticker on its bumper, whether it's the billboard towering over your horizon or the spam text on your phone. Such advertising fatigues us and we know it, but it also is all we know, and so even though we hate it, it's where we go and what we do when we need to get a word out. It's the logic we subscribe to when we seek to build a platform for ourselves, when we seek to create a wow product or experience and bring it to market.

How do we break out of this vortex? How do we promote the things we're passionate about without coming to hate ourselves in the process?

First of all, we should know what we're passionate about, and invest our promotional energies in that. Asa Chandler was, it seems to me, passionate about Christianity; he forced himself, I think, to be passionate about Coca Cola. Passion can be cultivated, but it shouldn't be manufactured. Figure out what you're passionate about before you invest yourself in building a platform--even before you invest yourself in creating a wow product. Passion is the first ingredient in wow, anyway. It's passion that will sustain you in the hard work of making your products and experiences compelling; it'll sustain you in the often frustrating work of assembling a platform for getting the word out.

Second, we should give ourselves permission to be enthusiastic. I talked to a friend recently who has written her first novel; she's noticed that it's much easier for her to promote these fictional characters, this imagined story, than it is for her to promote her more memoirish writing. It feels to her like she's doing a friend a favor, rather than promoting herself, which often feels like begging for attention or shouting silliness like some Shamwow salesman. But all her writing comes out of a passion for the way words work on people; she has a natural enthusiasm for the craft of writing and the art of words. If your platform is based on your passion, moreso than a particular wow product, then your enthusiasm will be more organic, less manufactured. The things you promote become less products and more byproducts; the platform you assemble for yourself becomes less like conquered territory and more like space you're willing to share. It's our passions, not our products and most certainly not our platforms, that make us interesting, that make us compelling to the people around us. It's our passions, not the vain pursuit of platforms or wow products, that make us enjoy what we're doing and forget for a moment that we live in a social-Darwinian world where you're either selling something or being sold something. It's our passions that help us break free of the artificial, hyperpromotional world that we all secretly love and all desperately hate.

So when you think about platform, don't think about selling yourself. Don't even think about selling your stuff. Think about what you love, and then share what you love with the world. Soon enough all the other pieces will start to fall into place.

***

Do yourself a favor and read Brian Mahan's Forgetting Ourselves on Purpose. It's my very favorite book and will help you sort through this self-promotion--self-loathing stuff.

Platform for Postmoderns, Part One

I recently finished reading Platform by Michael Hyatt, former CEO of Thomas Nelson, the massive Christian publishing house recently purchased by the even massiver mainstream publishing house Harper Collins. Hyatt is a popular blogger (#6 on the top 100 Christian leaders to follow on Twitter!); he's popular mainly because of his liberality and insight as he pulls back the curtain on contemporary publishing. I've not met him, but I find him pretty entertaining and often insightful.

I'm reading Platform because everyone in the universe should, if you take some of my friends in the publishing industry seriously. This is the secret sauce, the magic bullet, the one thing standing between you and publishing success. Except it's not.

Don't get me wrong. I suspect that Platform has in fact been quite helpful to a number of people, and I know that it is, more or less, the paradigm practiced by a great number of highly successful authors. (Full disclosure: I've employed some of his suggestions in this very post.) But almost from page one it didn't ring true to me, and I think I've figured out why.

Platform is built on a paradox: you need a platform to get people to want your message or your product; you need a message or product that people want in order to build a platform. Hyatt downplays this paradoxical nature of platform, though, paying lip service to the "wow product" that your platform demands and concentrating instead on a platform's apparatus. Ignoring the paradox, he dives in head first to head shots and other purely pragmatic elements of the game. He parses out the gnats of platform, if you will, and swallows the camel in the process. This failure to wrestle with the paradox, even to acknowledge it, sets the whole book on the wrong course for me.

The underlying assumption of Platform is that you are the CEO of You, Inc., purveyor of You,^tm the product. You move product by executing your marketing plan, which is you, and you are aided in your efforts by the work you've done to build your brand, which is you, and to establish your platform, which is everyone else.

This sounds narcissistic, and in a technical sense I suppose it is. But only as a means to an end: you are passionate about your message or product--so passionate that you identify yourself entirely with it--and you know that in a world with seven billion similarly passionate purveyors of product, it's going to take a little narcissism to break out of the pack. The problem with this perspective on platform, as I see it, isn't narcissism. (That's significant, since narcissism is my shtick, and you would think that in service to my own platform I would make narcissism the problem with Hyatt's.) The problem as I see it is the lingering modernism in Hyatt's paradigm, and all its attendant assumptions.

First of all, there's a fundamental sense of isolation in this understanding of platform. We are necessarily the center of our universe, all Hyatt's affirmation of the Audience notwithstanding. If we aren't the center, our brand and our mission suffer, so to build a platform we must increasingly interpret the world as revolving around us. We don't have the luxury of friends, even peers; all other individuals are either tools or threats to our success. They may teach us or train us, they may do our accounting or design our websites or edit our tweets. They may compete for our customers or distract us from our mission. But they're not whole persons in and of themselves; they're orbiting our life, never coming to a landing in it. Wherever our platform is, under Hyatt's paradigm, it's a lonely place.

Second, there's a fundamental dehumanization in the embrace of such an understanding of platform. We aren't free to be human beings, with all our frailties. There's no rest in the construction of a platform, and there's not one inch of the entire landscape about which the brand does not cry out, "This is mine!" We tell our stories not because we need to be known but because our stories may move product or mobilize people on our behalf. We don't confess failure; we convert it into a talking point that reinforces our main point. We don't admit need because our platform always beckons; our show must always go on.

Finally, there's a frustrating materialism inherent in the modernist logic of platform as laid out in Hyatt's book. Success is measured by moved product, by hits and likes and shares and retweets and measurable metrics. The platform ultimately becomes all there is; it subsists entirely on itself. Seventeen chapters into the book Hyatt acknowledges without irony that "these days I find myself increasingly speaking on the topic of social media, because I am a blogger who has fed the growth of my blog's audience--and, therefore, the size of my platform--through social media." After all the advice about head shots and media kits and pit crews and branding tools, it really comes down to this: Hyatt's platform is based almost entirely on his expertise on building platform. There is no reality outside it; the platform is all there is.

I will set aside the oddness of this isolating, dehumanizing, materialist and narcissistic enterprise being championed by an undisputed global leader in cultural evangelicalism. (Hyatt is #6 on a recent list of top Christian leaders to follow on Twitter. I ranted about the list here. For an interesting lament on the dominance of evangelical publishing like Hyatt's Thomas Nelson in American Christian culture, from one of his peers in the Harper Industrial Complex, read this.) For now, I'm most interested in the shelf life of the paradigm Hyatt lays out in his book.

Modernity is, like Baby Boomers, winding down; its cultural dominance lies more in its long tenure than in its sustainability into the future. Like Baby Boomers, modernity still works, but it tires easily, and it struggles to make sense of the new realities springing up all around it. As generally helpful as Platform is, the platform Hyatt proposes in it is, in fact, a crumbling edifice. It'll hold for a while, but it will eventually break down without warning.

Meanwhile, pushing up through its cracking foundation is, I believe, an approach to getting your message out that is more fitted to the future, more informed by postmodern sensibilities. I'll start to paint that picture in a forthcoming post, where I have no doubt that I will give it a pollyannish gloss. So I welcome all my friends who are Hyatt apologists or happy modernists, now and in the weeks to come, to sharpen their pencils and ready their critiques. Let's start with this:

* Where do you think I'm being unfair in my critique of Hyatt's Platform?

* What did you get out of the book that's helped you get your message out?

Platform for Postmoderns: Writing for Free & for Freedom

The following originally appeared on the High Calling blog. I'm a little short on ideas at the moment, so I repost it here as part of my series on platform for postmoderns. Read part one of that series here, or the whole series (in random order) here.

There was a time in my adult life where my wages were a result of my fundraising efforts. I was horrible at it. I lasted about two years, and only then by taking job after job of the oddest sorts. Finally I admitted defeat and secured a position at a not-for-profit publishing company that paid me a set hourly wage. Instead of cajoling or guilting my friends every month, now I only had to keep my bosses satisfied.

Around that time I was getting the itch to write—and by “write” I don’t mean keep a journal or send letters to loved ones that didn’t involve asking them for money. I mean writing for publication, so I set to work getting my name out there. I’m about as good a networker as I am a fundraiser, but I managed to make a couple of connections that led to some intermittent assignments and a corresponding byline. I was living the dream—if by dream you mean a steady paycheck and some cash on the side, with an occasionally indulged delusion of grandeur.

I still work in publishing, and so the collision of fame and fortune is almost part of my job description. Several times a year I put a book contract in the mail to someone who’s always dreamt of writing a book; when I get the contract back from them, I send them a check. Sometime later, I send them a printed book with their name on the front and the back and the spine, and typically another check. It’s generally a tossup whether they’ll be more excited about the book or the check.

I get it, when authors care more about the money than the book. For one thing, who wouldn’t want a little more brass in pocket? But more than that, these days anyone can write anything for easy and cheap public dissemination. Getting paid to write these days is more than just remuneration; it’s validation.

TWEET THIS: Getting paid to write these days is more than just remuneration; it’s validation.

I get it when the book wins out too, though: money is fleeting, but a Library of Congress entry is forever. Besides, for many people a book is a door-opener, making it possible to speak in front of large crowds and create new revenue streams for themselves. Sometimes the least profitable outcome of an author’s writing is the royalty check.

But step back from this fame-fortune matrix and you start to see a problem: everything, from your name to your innermost thoughts to your way of turning a phrase, is a commodity. You no longer create just for the sake of creating; you create to exploit, and everything is exploitable. You reach a point where you catch yourself mid-thought and think instead, Where can I pitch this?

Once, when I was regularly failing to hit my fundraising goals and desperately cutting costs to get by, my monthly letter took an introspective turn. “If something’s worth doing,” I remember writing, “it’s worth doing for free.” I remember leaning back from my computer and wondering if I actually believed it. And of course, it’s easily countered by no less than the apostle Paul reminding us that the worker is worth his wages. But I remember deciding that I did, in fact, actually believe it. And it’s changed how I write, and even how I think.

Writing for free, it turns out, is actually freeing. It turns out that exploitation doesn’t just affect the exploited; it also affects the exploiter. These days I write what interests me, and I don’t write what bores me. If people want to pay me, I welcome their money, but if something doesn’t strike me as worth the time and energy it’ll take me, these days no amount of money will sway me. (At least no amount I’ve been offered to date.)

TWEET THIS: Writing for free, it turns out, is actually freeing.

No less than Jesus the Christ once said that you can’t serve both God and mammon. That’s not a statement about mammon; it’s a statement about us. You can’t serve both God and food either, but that doesn’t mean you give up eating forever. You just choose who you’re going to serve, and you do what makes sense. Sometimes that means a little brass in pocket, but sometimes it means that if something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing for free.

Platform for Postmoderns: It Takes a Village to Sell a Book

As a book editor, I'm regularly in the surreal position of reviewing and signing off on author acknowledgments. They thank their kids, of course, and their spouses, and their parents. They thank their coworkers and their friends and even occasionally their enemies. They thank anonymous manuscript reviewers and celebrity endorsers. And almost to a person, they thank me, their humble editor.

I have on at least one occasion edited myself out of a book's acknowledgments. I don't remember ever editing myself in.

These very kind acknowledgments of my work on have always been gracious, and for the most part I think they've been sincere. But I also recognize how perfunctory the editor acknowledgment can be. I think it used to be policy (or tacit understanding) that editors would remove their names from acknowledgments. Maybe we're more narcissistic now, or maybe we realized there's a bit of pomposity even in that. In any case, it's universally understood to be awkward, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be done.

"To be a writer is either to be utterly anonymous (the ghost) or arena-ready (the celebrity)." Read about the shadow side of publishing in "Getting Seen" here.

Some of the authors I've worked with have looked beyond me to acknowledge the other publishing professionals who have helped make their book. They thank the designer for the beautiful book cover. They thank the publisher for signing off on the contract. They thank the copyeditor and the proofreader and the page layout specialist for working so hard to make their book so good. And occasionally they thank the sales and marketing people they've met along the way for encouraging them as they went through the publishing process.

But it's rare, almost to the point of unprecedented, for an author to thank sales and marketing people for selling and marketing their book. That's because there's nothing to acknowledge; they haven't sold or marketed it yet. Or, at least, the author hasn't seen them sell or market it yet.

The reality, of course, is that a great deal of effort has already gone into selling and marketing a book by the time it releases. Advance reader copies have been sent to reviewers. Bookstores have been visited, and the book has been introduced there. Campaigns have been brainstormed. Ads have been designed. Ad space has been bought. Clouds have been seeded in the hopes that the four corners of the book's universe will be flooded with its praises. This anticipatory sales and marketing work, done in relative secrecy, is quite possibly the most helpful stage in a book's publication process.

Then the book comes out.

The reality is that the success of all this anticipatory effort depends largely on people who don't work for the publisher. It doesn't even depend all that much on the author. The reality is that every book needs an audience not just to read the book, not even just to buy the book, but to advocate for it.

Book publishing is a weird undertaking. It's not like, say, candy bar manufacturing, where year after year you come up with new ways of building on the success of each candy bar's established reputation. Imagine if there were only, say, ten thousand Snickers bars made in a year, and the guy who made it and a team of sales people had to travel the country convincing people to give them a few minutes to talk about Snickers in the hope that they'll stock a small supply in their store, in the further hope that customers will see it there and decide to buy it. Or imagine that instead of humming "Break me off a piece of that Kit Kat bar" at 3 in the afternoon you instead thought, Well, I've already eaten a Kit Kat bar once, so I guess I'll try to decide which candy bar to eat next. Unlike candy bars, which are relatively interchangeable and always whimsical, books are problematically unique. They are bought and consumed individually, privately, such that every sale of every one could very well be the last.

To contend with the black hole of solitary reading habits, publishers push authors to expand their platform, by which we mean authors need to get out in front of people and breathe enthusiasm into them for their book. On the days of my clearest thinking I realize how quixotic an expectation that is; it's paradoxical at the level of "Get a job so you can get experience so you can get a job." (That is, by the way, four x's in one sentence, which I think is an accomplishment worth noting.) Every publishing enterprise depends on volunteerism for its very survival: people have to voluntarily come to the author, the publisher, the book. And then they have to voluntarily share the book with the world. Of course the author and the publisher (and even the book) have to attract this voluntary audience, to compel it and to live up to whatever promises are made. But maybe you can see how hard that can be. I see it every day.

What's my point? I have three:

For authors, please be kind to your salespeople and your marketers. They work really hard, and most of their effort is invisible even to you. Give them the benefit of the doubt; hold your dreams of being on Good Morning America or in the Atlantic Monthly loosely. Bring them your best ideas and assume you're getting their best attention and effort. Thank them in advance in your acknowledgments, and thank them when you talk to them for committing themselves to your book.

But don't stop there. Look for opportunities to mobilize your friends, family and other social networks on behalf of the book. Acknowledge among your strongest allies that it takes a village to make a book succeed. Invest some energies into brainstorming how people who are for you can be more actively for your book. You need advocates to make a movement out of your book; you need volunteers to help you start the fire.

For readers - and by that I mean people who recognize the cultural value of books - consider broadening your imagination about what it means to be a reader. Read publicly, not privately; share what you're reading in your social media and offline with friends and neighbors. Write reviews on Amazon and Goodreads and elsewhere. Get to know the people who run the bookstores you frequent. Interact with the publishers you feel the most affinity with. Recommend authors as presenters at gatherings you attend. Help the writers you like get a wider hearing than they would otherwise get.

Obviously, acknowledging the role of people outside the publishing industry in the success of a book doesn't relieve the salespeople or the marketers (or the editors or the author) from our responsibility to deliver on the promises we're making with each book. Fundamental to any movement worth joining is an idea worth disseminating. But if we value reading as something that keeps our world vital and intelligent and circumspect and hopeful, then we need to recognize that buying and selling books is not simply a consumer exercise like buying and selling Kit Kats. Books are not the private consumer product we too often assume them to be; they're fundamentally social, and when they're acknowledged and treated as such, they can be world-changing.

***

This post is part of a very occasional series called "Platform for Postmoderns," an attempt on my part to demystify (and maybe even remystify) the publishing experience.

Read part one here.
Read the whole series (in random order) here.

Platform for Postmoderns, Part Two: Establishing Authority

If you want to build a platform, you must first plant a tree . . .

Why do we listen to the people we listen to? Why do we give them our attention? Our money? Why do we make commitments to them?

Some might chalk it up to charisma--the man or woman who can win hearts can sell them anything. This seems to explain, for example, Justin Bieber. Arguably it also explains people like Adolf Hitler, but that is by no means a statement on my part about the man who gave us "Baby, Baby, Baby." (See my other caveats regarding this series of posts here.)

Such "great man" theories are part of American mythology--and they are at least partially rooted in lived experience. People like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X captivated people's imaginations and caused them to see the world dramatically differently. People like Sojourner Truth and Rosa Parks launched national conversations and cultural movements through single, powerful symbolic words ("Ain't I a woman?!?") and acts (the refusal to yield a bus seat, in violation of an unjust local ordinance). I take nothing away from the vision or the accomplishments of people whose lives are so illustrious.

But to characterize these people as nothing more than a few words, a few moments, or even a charismatic presence is not only to diminish their significance; it is to disregard the much larger, much more challenging work that undergirded their public efforts and dramatically amplified their impact. Sojourner Truth confronted the incipient racism of pre-Civil-War America from the dais of a rally for women's suffrage. She was given a voice in a movement she helped to build; and her particular contribution can only be fully understood in that larger context. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were compelling public figures, yes, but they were also tireless, passionate participants in a broad, organized and strategic movement to reimagine human dignity in a supposedly free society. Rosa Parks, who was my age at the time of her arrest, did in fact make a spontaneous decision to resist, but it was an informed spontaneity; she was active in the local chapter of the NAACP, and such individual acts of nonviolent resistance were, while not yet commonplace, relatively regular occurrences. Her network made the strategic determination that her act of resistance, unlike the others, would give them the momentum to make discrimination a national conversation.

I'm an editor of Christian nonfiction books. That's what I do. I'm also an author; that's more what I'd like to do, as much as possible. I'd like steadily increasing numbers of people tuning in to what I have to say about the topics of my choosing. I want to be known as an author, which is to say that I want to be granted authority.

That's what all these folks, from Justin Bieber to Sojourner Truth, had: authority. They spoke or sang or acted; people listened, danced and were transformed. Some might argue that these folks were inherently "great men" or "great women," that the universe cooked up their strand of DNA special because the times demanded them. Others would argue that they each had a "wow" product--they had developed a sound or vision that, once shared, everyone would embrace. I would argue instead that each participated--even gave their lives to--something that in response gave them the platform needed to be heard, respected and embraced. For Bieber, that was first pop sensation Usher and then Usher's infrastructure, which eventually included Island Records and their distribution and promotional engines. For Sojourner Truth, it was the abolitionist organization NAEI, which put her in contact with such luminaries as Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. For Martin Luther King it was the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; for Malcolm X it was the Nation of Islam. For Adolf Hitler, tragically, it was the government of Germany.

Authority is not inherent; it is earned and organized. Gravitas, charisma and vision are, perhaps, part of the interior makeup of a person, but authority is a social contract. Such has always been the case, though we've only been conscious of it since the dawn of democracy; the U.S. Declaration of Independence codified the concept when it declared that "Governments are instituted among Men" for the sole purpose of administering and protecting fundamental human rights, and that such governmental authority is derived "from the consent of the governed."

All authority is granted authority; all authority is vested with the interests of those who sit under that authority. King, X, Truth and Parks are great in our imagination because we wanted them, because we invited them, to be great. Justin Bieber has achieved such enormous success because enough people set him on a stage and told him, "Here we are; now, entertain us."

I write all this to say that a platform is not an overnight phenomenon, nor is it the inevitable outcome of one "wow" idea. An idea is not a means to the end of a platform; a platform is a means to the end of further disseminating a wow idea.

We listen to people--we give them our time, our attention, our money--and make commitments to them because we want to, plain and simple. And we want to because we determine that what they are putting forward is good, credible, true, right. And especially in a postmodern setting, where the hubris of modernity is a matter of historical record, where egregious abuses of authority have been on display at all levels, where the consent of the governed is still forcefully contested by tyrannical regimes--especially in the world we find ourselves in, we grant people authority carefully, begrudgingly. In a postmodern setting, you simply have to earn it.

How do you earn it? You demonstrate the credibility of your proposition. You don't declare your idea to be a "wow"; you test it and refine it and ask questions of it and trash it and start over. You devote yourself to your idea, your sound, your vision, and you submit yourself to the earned authority of others. You let yourself be instructed by Usher about what sounds good, what compels the imagination of a pop music audience, because Usher has himself already devoted himself to the question. You collaborate and brainstorm with people who like you have been compelled by a similar wow idea, and you test the validity of your idea on the streets where it must survive. You give yourself to the idea, and then you ask others whether it's something that they can give themselves to as well. But whether they do or they don't, you have decided and resolved that the idea is worth what it demands of you.

You also recognize that you don't command the respect of an audience simply by having an idea. Postmodernity is a buyer's market: sovereignty lies not with those who have enough military, makeup or marketing money to force their wow idea on us; sovereignty lies with us. By offering your wow idea, your wow product, to a wider audience, you are making both a commitment and a request: "This thing that I have, I think is worth you giving yourself to. I may be wrong, but would you consider what it would mean for you if I'm right?"

In this respect, a postmodern platform is like a demonstration plot. In farming, new ideas are dangerous. A family farm might be put out of business forever after one bad year trying one wrong-headed idea. So new ideas in farming are tested via demonstration plots, where new seed is planted or new techniques are employed in space where other farmers can come and investigate for themselves. They can see the impact on the soil, on the surrounding land. They can taste the quality of the end product. They can touch and smell and otherwise measure the impact of the idea on display. And those farmers can decide for themselves just how "wow" the idea is.

This, then, is the new shape of authority: it is requested, not imposed; it is tested, not assumed; it is rooted in credible experience, not in divine right or cultural mythology. Authority is established over time, at the end of hard work. If you want to build a platform, you'll need to build it by the sweat of your own brow, from the wood of your own making. That means, if you want to build a platform, first you have to plant a tree.

I've written elsewhere on authority. Check it out here.

Next up, building coalitions. But till then . . .

Why do you listen to the people you listen to?

What do you need to see in order to commit yourself to an idea?

Platform for Postmoderns: People Are Not Points or Punchlines

Writers do it. Stand-up comedians do it. I suppose I do it. And it annoys me pretty much every time.

"I remember this time someone asked me ..."

The story that gets you to the point. The story that gets you to the punchline. The story that lets people know how awesome you are without coming right out and saying "I'm awesome because ..." That story annoys me pretty much every time.

We are, I think, at an awkward stage in the history of communication. Over the past fifty years we've slowly, clumsily made a transition from locating authority in our clinical expertise (for example, Dr. Spock as parenting guru) to locating authority in our street cred. We long ago tired of reading books by consultants, who present dry research and maybe occasionally buttress the claims of their findings by way of abstract illustration or clearly invented case study. We don't want to hear about how patient X complained of dysfunction Y and demonstrates the value of innovative remedy Z. We are well into the ascendancy of story, far out into the deep waters of self-disclosure. I don't want an author, or a speaker, to declare himself (it was almost always a himself) right; I want an author or a speaker to walk me through how he or she was confronted with the ways that he or she or we have been wrong.

And yet this transition has been sloppy. The clinical expert has tenure; he is hard to unseat. And from that position of power he still sets expectations for how we communicate, how we validate the points we make. So when we tell stories, we often wind up telling them on other people. We reduce them to elevate ourselves.

Chief among the offenders, I think, are the stand-up comics. They've moved past "A guy walks into a bar" jokes; these are too detached for our taste. So instead they tell a story about a time they walked into a bar, where invariably they wound up talking to someone stupid. And invariably in their story they get the better of this stupid barfly.

We, their audience, are meant to be impressed by the comic's keener sense of reality, their quicker wit. And because we are invited into this story, we are made to feel superior to the stupid people out roaming the earth. We, the audience, are better than you, the non-audience. Everybody wins - except that loser in the bar.

But falling in close behind the stand-up comics are people with points to make. Authors, consultants, motivational speakers, preachers - anyone who uses the word platform, really - is at risk for this exploitative kind of storytelling. I fall into this group; I write and speak on a fairly regular basis, but I also work in the publishing industry, which relies on this kind of communicator. We regularly encourage these folks to tell more stories, to demonstrate the embodiment of their ideas so that their readers can better imagine what a world inhabited by their ideas would look like. Many of them wind up telling stories about how they explained their ideas to someone. Blech.

"A guy came up to me after my presentation. He asked me X. I told him Y. Aren't I clever?"

For the record, that's not what we mean. Don't transcribe conversations you have with people about the themes of your book. Don't put quotation marks around your points. This is not why stories exist.

Stories are paintings using words instead of paint. Stories infuse the real world with the energy of myths and epics. Stories are meant to make a moment historic. Stories aren't meant to make a point.

TWEET THIS: Stories are meant to make a moment historic. Stories aren't meant to make a point.

That's not why people exist either, for the record. People aren't props for your messages. People aren't points, any more than they are punchlines. People are people, and they deserve better than to be used.

So tell your stories, but make sure they're real stories, with drama and tension, not just packaging for your proselytizing. And introduce us to people, but as bearers of the image of God, not as marionettes for your message.