Spontaneous Generation and Author Platform

Today’s post is by historian, podcaster and writer Doug Sofer, Ph.D.

This is a little embarrassing. I’m a historian who values logic and evidence, but sometimes I can’t help but believe in a little bit of magic—especially when it comes to building an author platform.

Maybe you’ve felt the same way. Platform-building is full of mysteries that can make even the most rational person start to wonder about magical solutions. Questions like, “What’s my brand?” “Which social media should I use?” “How do I grow my audience?” are just the start. To me, building a platform feels like trying to create something out of nothing. On one hand, we’re told that we need a large audience to get published. On the other hand, we need to get published to build that audience. How do you attract readers if you haven’t yet established yourself? And how do you establish yourself without readers?

It feels like spontaneous generation: the old belief that life could just appear from lifeless matter. For most of history, people thought that living critters—little ones especially—could just materialize into being. It wasn’t until the 17th century that Francesco Redi, an early scientist, began to challenge this idea. He showed that if you kept flies away from rotting meat, no maggots would appear.

Even after Redi’s experiments, belief in spontaneous generation persisted for centuries. In fact, even Redi himself didn’t entirely give up on the idea. While he was disproving spontaneous generation for flies, he still believed in it for other invertebrates. He speculated that plants and animals had some mysterious force within them that could create life. Roundworms might generate inside intestines, or suddenly you’d just be lousy with lice even when there hadn’t been a single other louse in the house. The reason he didn’t just abandon spontaneous generation altogether is that the life cycles of some parasites can be extremely complicated. Without today’s powerful scientific tools, at some point Redi threw up his hands and called it all sorcery.

My big takeaway is that even Redi, one of the people famous for having refuted spontaneous generation, still hedged his bets when reality got too complex. It wasn’t his fault. Settling the question required centuries of additional scientific research, debate, and technological advancements. Only in the 19th century did Louis Pasteur’s work with bacteria finally prove that life doesn’t just hocus-pocus out of thin air.

This whole story is like my own struggles with platform-building. Like Redi, I start thinking magically when things start to feel too complicated. For example, I’ll catch myself believing in stories of spontaneous, overnight success. We’ve all heard about someone’s blog or YouTube channel suddenly going viral. Those are great stories, but they create the false impression that you can build an enormous audience through simple luck. And once I start thinking that way, I start gluing horseshoes to my laptop.

Fortunately, there are some present-day Redis and Pasteurs working out the nonmagical origins of getting lucky. Data scientists have shown that what feels like luck is really the result of consistent work and smart decision making. Consider what Seth Stephens-Davidowitz describes as “Springsteen’s Rule” in his book, Don’t Trust Your Gut. Bruce Springsteen didn’t just rely on talent; he shared his music far and wide, moving his hungry heart out of his hometown in order to increase his chances of being noticed. It’s an example of “hacking” one’s luck and it’s based on Samuel Fraiberger’s research about artists’ success. The ones who flourished took their art shows on the road, traveling to many different galleries of many different kinds. So yes, luck matters—but we can make it work for us through evidence-informed strategy.

And successful authors do much more than simply hack their luck. They also get advice from people with actual, real-world experience in building these kinds of readerships. There are some incredibly helpful resources out there—Jane Friedman’s blog here is definitely one of them. I recently took Allison K Williams’ and Jane’s enlightening Zero-To-Platform Bootcamp webinar, which helped me gain some much-needed perspective. I learned that successful platforms take persistence, patience, and probably a couple of years to build. And that’s okay.

The process is about knowing yourself, what you have to offer, and understanding who will benefit from having your words in their lives. It’s about communicating with your specific population of readers and finding ways to engage meaningfully with them. It requires knowing what kinds of books have been written already, and where there are opportunities to find an appropriate niche for you in the marketplace. Success usually requires a lot more than just being good or lucky. It takes time, persistence, and strategy.

The history of spontaneous generation also shows us that filtering truth out of complex, interconnected variables requires experimentation. On this front, I’ve found the advice from literary agent Max Sinsheimer’s YouTube presentation especially useful. He urges authors to think of the publishing process as an ongoing research project that constantly evolves. That approach makes sense to me because building a rep as a writer is just as complicated as the life cycles of the creepiest and crawliest creepy-crawlies out there. Readers, like other large groups of humans, seem to be as unpredictable as any of the parasites that confounded Francesco Redi.

So I’ll try to cut myself some slack when I start feeling like the whole process is just a bunch of sorcery. When I catch myself riding my broom off to Hogwarts, I just try to return the land of muggles as quickly as I can. If understanding platform-building is ongoing, maybe the real trick is to treat it like a continuing journey and do our best to enjoy the ride. Just like Redi’s quest for truth, it’s about experimenting more, learning, adapting. For my part, it’s also about staying patient and pursuing my aims methodically, instead of wishing for a platform to conjure itself into existence.

Doug Sofer

Historian Doug Sofer, Ph.D. is the creator of “You Are A Weirdo,” a podcast, blog, and book project about how history helps us understand the strangeness of now. You can find his offbeat, rigorously researched work at findyourselfinhistory.com. Doug is a professor of history at Maryville College in East Tennessee.