Grab a cocktail or some cake, get comfy, and let’s do some official case profiling on what works and doesn’t work for an author platform. What follows is the author platform case study on CG DREWS to help inspire you with your own author platform.
WHO IS CG DREWS:
CG Drews is the author of A THOUSAND PERFECT NOTES and THE BOY WHO STEALS HOUSES. Translated into five languages, nominated for the 2020 CILIP Carnegie Medal and won the CBCA 2021 Honour Award. An Australian who never sleeps and believes in eating cake for breakfast. (We love this!)
Besides being a fellow cake lover and Australian, CG Drews is also a wizard with her author platform!
An autistic author of YA & MG (middle grade) stories, CG Drews is also a voracious reader and reviewer of LGBT-young-adult books including epic fantasy, contemporary, mental health, and fairy tale retellings.
BRAND NAME:
Most authors use their name as part of their brand, but CG Drews flipped the lid on this by using the name ‘Paper Fury'(spelled as either Paper Fury or Paperfury) where she was a book reviewer long before publishing her first book.
Yes, there is a constant shift between profiles of the name Paperfury, Paper Fury, or CG DREWS.
WEBSITE:
This website is the heart of CG’s author platform named Paperfury.com
We found this site confusing when we first landed. It’s because of the header (the primary image on this site, shown below). It’s what visitors see when they first land on your site, and we had no clue what this site was all about.
Paper fury? Stationery shop?
And an arrow?
Buy books for who on what?
You’ve got 8.5 seconds to see what you can make of it – which is the average time a reader spends on a site before they bounce. What do you see?
CG Drew blogs twice a month: 1 book review and 1 author interview. It’s part of a blog tour for authors, offering new readers a chance to win a free book. She then promotes this author interview, book review, and cover imagery across CG Drew’s various social media sites.
This is her side hustle, where she has ingeniously combined her love of reading and reviewing books into becoming an influencer for authors of this genre. Her posts have regular readers and comments, especially for the competition entries, making for an active site.
Sadly, we found many of the past review links were broken.
If you are an author of this genre, you can request CG Drews to do a book promotion and review here >>
There is a link to join up with her newsletter, but it wasn’t working at the time of this case study.
SOCIAL MEDIA USED BY THE AUTHOR:
Love it or hate it, authors usually have one or more social media sites they use as an extension of their author platform.
Some have none. In this author platform case study, CG Drew is well connected on various social media sites. However, we found it confusing as she went under two different profile names: Paperfury (Paper fury) or CG Drews as shown in the screenshots below.
INSTAGRAM:
Avatar: book cover
Name: @PAPERFURY
- 94 K followers
- posts daily on: book reviews from her blog; those on her book tours; book collections in her book’s genre
- Gorgeous feed consistent with her brand colours and just on books
TWITTER:
Avatar: book cover
Name: @PAPERFURY + C.G. DREWS
- 42k followers
- posts daily (Monday to Friday) about writing and authors.
- No book reviews. She kept this site purely to show off her sassy authoring persona of life as a writer. We’re a fan.
GOODREADS:
Avatar: AUTHOR PROFILE
Name: C.G. DREWS
- 22k followers
- #6 most followed author in Goodreads Australia
- #1 most popular review of all time in Australia
PINTEREST:
Avatar: book cover
Name: @PAPERFURY
- 6.5k followers
- pins weekly for her WIP, GIFs, quotes and image prompts for her works in progress
TUMBLR:
Avatar: book cover
Name: @PAPERFURY
- 19k followers
- Feed is a combination of her Twitter posts and Instagram feeds.
- Deserted a year ago for TikTok
TIKTOK:
Avatar: book cover
Name: @CGDREWS
- 8k followers
- Posts daily
- Same feed as her Instagram reels
- Hit and miss consistency with her readers for likes.
- Most viral is posting about inconsistency in book covers for a series:
AUTHOR PLATFORM EXTRAS WORTH NOTING:
PATREON:
Avatar: book cover
Name: @PAPERFURY
- CG Drews ran a Patreon campaign for the sequel to her book The Boy who Steals Houses.
- It is exclusive only on Patreon as a serialised version of her book.
- Once a member, you get access to Q&A sessions with the author.
AMAZON VERSUS GOODREADS REVIEWS:
We did a comparison between Goodreads and Amazon reviews, as all authors know how valuable social proof is for your books.
But this one surprised us with the findings:
- Goodreads showed each book had almost four-thousand reviews. Each.
- Amazon, these same books barely averaged 500 reviews!?!
- CG Drews doesn’t promote on Amazon. She doesn’t bother with the author panel at all. She’s just not here.
JUST NOT HERE!
CG Drew’s author platform case study is a great example of how well she knows her audience (readers), as shown by the large numbers of active followers.
Her blog, Instagram, TikTok, and Goodreads feeds are tools used for her business to connect with readers as a book reviewer. Her Twitter account is for fun to connect with other authors.
The newsletter sign-on is by WordPress. It didn’t work. And there was no real incentive to sign on, as there was no reader magnet.
She has no Facebook account, no Bookbub account, and no Amazon author profile. And why should she? The demographics of her readers within this genre show they don’t use those platforms at all. And we suspect that they don’t read emails either.
AUTHOR PLATFORM LESSONS LEARNED FROM THIS CASE STUDY:
After having built, designed, and managed various author platforms over the years, we really like this author platform, and only offer the following as ways to improve your own author platform:
THE NAME: Stick to the same name across your author platform, preferably your own author’s name. This allows readers to find you between the various social media channels, making you easily recognisable in the BOOKSTORE! (Which we discuss in detail in the book, Your Author Brand.)
WEBSITE: make it clear in the header who you are, and what you do. Clearly. And succinctly. You only have a few seconds for visitors to know what you write and the genre you write in. Don’t make them hunt for it.
NEWSLETTER: check it works for people to sign on, especially on your website. We can help with that as we regularly remind readers in our own emails, along with many other free tips and tricks!
BLOG LINKS: like your newsletter, do a periodic check to see if your website links work (like we show in this post), especially if you’re promoting your book.
SOCIAL MEDIA SITES: be picky, as your time matters most, by being only where your readers are. You don’t have to be everywhere.
AVATAR & HEADER: use the same branded avatar and imagery on the headers for your website and social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. Consistency of your images, like avatars and headers, helps readers recognise you and know that they’re in the right place.
AUTHOR PLATFORM CASE STUDY REVIEW:
This is a wonderful example of an author platform.
CG Drews has nailed her author brand beautifully, using the same filtered tone for her images, which is a consistent stream of books in her genre. It’s a part of her brand as a book reviewer, influencer, and author.
Her author content is based on a regular blog post, that is then repurposed to fit her various social media outlets using her power as an influencer.
We liked her avatar, which is the image of her own book, THE BOY WHO STEALS HOUSES, that is consistently being flashed in front of over two hundred thousand potential readers! FREE.
Overall, it’s an author platform formula that works for CG Drews.
But will it work for you?
