Platform is one of those terms that many authors hate. Every time it comes up, there’s a visceral reaction that hits faces immediately. It’s usually tempered pretty quickly, because most of us have come to realize that platform (or audience) is one of the keys to this whole publishing thing. While we long for the day that we can “just write,” we’ve realized that hard marketing work is a fact of life. Sometimes, though, it’s helpful to see some of the benefits of platform at work. The other day, Tim Challies posted the results of a survey he put up last week about where and why his audience buys books. If you don’t know Tim, he’s a Christian who’s been blogging daily since 2002. He’s consistent (he’s blogged for 2,386 days consecutively as of this writing), he writes well, and he’s developed quite an audience. His first book, The Discipline of Spiritual Discernment, came out a couple of years ago. He’s writing his second book, The Next Story, and posts occasionally about the process. Tim posted his survey and got over 2,000 responses. (The people at Gallup and Barna Research were jealous.) Now, it probably wasn’t as statistically “dispersed” as the official pollsters try to force their data to be — but from a research perspective, the study would be defined as “Where does Tim Challies’ Audience buy books?” so the population sample is perfect. Tim Challies’ audience answered the survey! He found out which publishers his audience likes (and dislikes), where they’re most likely to buy books (and why). The platform lesson from his survey is this: when you’ve developed your platform, market research becomes a natural bi-product of what you’re doing. I don’t think Tim was doing this for market research purposes (the way he assesses the data indicates that), but there is a whole lot of great market research data there. This is just one of the benefits of having built trust and rapport with your audience. I didn’t hesitate to give Tim answers to his questions. I trust him to handle data with integrity, to be open and honest, and I like him. Your audience—when you develop it, when the people who make it up trust you—can and will give you everything you need to know about how best to get your message into their hands. Just another reason that platform is so important.