How Strong of a Platform is Needed?

I just got a rejection from an agent because he didn't feel I had a strong enough platform, and I don't really understand why he said that. In my query, I just told a little bit about my story - that's it. And yet he talked about my platform - how would he know?

I do have a link in my signature on my email to our website, so I suppose he could have gone there. If he did, I would think that would be a fairly strong platform - our journal from our last journey got nearly 700,000 hits, and we have plenty of newspaper articles scanned in. Yes, we have a lot more that we don't have on there, and I've gotten some articles published recently that we don't have on there.

Anyway, how much do you have to have to have a "strong" platform?

I certainly do understand that, and we are planning to seek out publicity on our upcoming journey. It just seemed odd that he would comment on my not having a strong enough platform when he really didn't even know what I had!

Good point. I debated on whether to put something about my platform in my query, but didn't think it belonged there. Maybe I do need to rethink that.

I think I will add a short paragraph in there - maybe it will convince some agents that I'm legit anyway!

I sent the other query out to 17 agents the other day - have had two requests for more, so maybe the other one wasn't bad either. But I do think it'll make it stronger if I add a bit about my platform. I think I'll wait a couple weeks until the false memoir thing blows over a little bit before sending out any more though.

It's a story about our bike trip around the USA and Mexico last year.

I'm really torn on what to do with it - on the one hand, I think I should work aggressively to get it out soon while it is still current. On the other hand, if I do that we will be on the road on our next trip when it comes out and I won't be able to publicize it much since we'll be traveling. We do expect quite a bit of traffic to our website and can publicize it there, plus we would be able to do radio interviews and stuff like that - but we wouldn't be able to go to book stores for signings or anything.

I can't help but think our upcoming journey will generate a fair amount of interest, so having this book out while we are on the road would be good. I dunno....

One of the two agents who asked for a partial turned me downed because:
1) how would I edit while on the road?
2) how would I publicize the book while on the road?
3) the whole false memoir thing out now - she feels publishers will be leery of memoirs for a while.

We will be taking a laptop with us - I don't see that being a problem at all.