To start marketing your book, you must first establish a platform for your book and its author. If this is your first foray into book marketing, these tasks will take some time, but they are essential activities.

The main contents of its platform are listed below.

* Strategic marketing plan

* Website page

* Amazon Central

* Social media accounts

* Media kit

Some of these activities cannot be completed until your book is published or on pre-order. In other words, after you have a presence on the Internet. You will need the cover image and other information about the book before you can complete these activities. If you have an editor, some activities may have already been done, but you should review them with a view to improving and strengthening them.

Let’s go over the content on your platform, one item at a time.

Strategic marketing plan:

This is the document that anchors and directs all your marketing activities. Perhaps the most important part is the identity of the customer. Unless you know who your customers are and how to reach them, your marketing activities will be in vain. For example, if you wrote a children’s picture book, you may think that children are your clients. They are not. Children don’t have money or credit cards, and they don’t surf the web looking for things to buy. The children’s parents and grandparents are their main customers.

Website page:

As a new author, you must face the fact that your book is published in the 21st century. Readers search and find books on the Internet. The implication of the last statement is that you and your book need a website. The easiest way to establish a web presence is to use a program like WordPress or Blogger or Weebly.

Websites like WordPress, Blogger, and Weebly have two essential types of content: pages and posts. Pages are static in the sense that they do not change unless you deliberately intend to change them. Once you set a page on the website, it stays there, it doesn’t move, and it doesn’t change.

The posts are for blogs and are not static pages. A new blog post will appear at the top of the website once you publish it. When you write a second post, the first post will move down to make room for the new post.

So what do you do with a website once you have it up and running? You use it to fool your book. There should be a dedicated page for the book and it should be easy to find. Don’t make a visitor search for the book page.

Initially, that page should have a cover image, your book blurb, and purchase links. You can also put your short synopsis on it.

Amazon Central:

Once your book is available for sale or pre-order on Amazon, you can start an author page. If you have an editor, they may have started this page for you. In this case, you need to look at it to see if you can add content to it.

You can find Author Central at: https://authorcentral.amazon.com/gp/home

After logging in with your password, you can add your bio and other information to the page. One of the great features of the author page is that you can add a lot of information about the book that you couldn’t do when you uploaded it to Kindle.

The topics of the book include Editorial Reviews. These are reviews that Amazon will not allow to be published on the book site because Amazon will not allow paid reviews. If you get a review from a reputable site like Publishers Weekly, this is the place to post it.

Another topic is From the author. Here you tell the readers why you wrote the book. Or the problems you encountered writing it. Or anecdotes from the writing process.

You can also upload videos to the page (that is, a trailer) and you can set an RSS feed so that your blog posts are displayed on the author page.

Altogether, the author page is a great marketing tool.

To find out what an author’s page looks like, go to mine: https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002BM76IE

Social media accounts:

Social media is an essential part of your marketing plan and your brand. However, be careful. Social media is a huge waste of time and many sites are almost useless when it comes to marketing and selling your book. However, you must persist.

At a minimum, I recommend that you create and maintain accounts on the following platforms:

* Goodreads

* Facebook

* LinkedIn

* Twitter

Feel free to use other accounts, but keep in mind that social media can be a huge waste of time and you want to advertise and market your book, not wasting time.

Media kit:

The purpose of a media kit is to let people in the media and other stakeholders know your writing credentials. If the book is your only writing project so far, there won’t be much material, but start anyway. If you posted short stories, articles, or other content, add it to enhance your resume. The media kit is on your website or blog and should be available to anyone who wants to download it. For that reason, you may want to consider not including personal information in it, such as your home address or phone number.

So what does a media kit include? Here is a list of items that make up your kit:

* Organic.

* Press releases.

* Links to websites.

* Body of work.

* Book descriptions.

* Book reviews.

Make sure the media kit is a doc or pdf file so everyone can download and open it.