Literary Agent Nathan Bransford recently hosted a rather excellent post offering an insider’s view to book sales. I highly recommend any writer reads the post, if only to confirm that publishers do in fact pay to get their book on the front tables of big bookshops.

However this quote caught my eye:

In summary: sales of your previous books, sales of “comp” titles, your platform as an author (as described on the fact sheets), the book’s cover, the current economic climate, events in the news, all contribute to how many copies of your book a given account will buy.

So an experienced book seller is telling us all that an author’s ‘platform’ has a direct impact on the amount of books they can sell to a bookshop…

Do you still need convincing that a writer MUST have an on-line presence?