To guide authors who are new to setting up an author platform for their nonfiction book brand, I started a free course “Your First Author Platform”. Just poke the ‘request’ button at: https://www.skool.com/book-funnel-flow-method-5378/about

I started this because as an author I found, when launching Sack Your Financial Planner (2008), that promoting a book with no visible online presence was VERY HARD. But I eventually learnt the best ways to approach it.

Securing my name as a domain name, I started blogging under that name in 2012. An old hand at blogging, I already had a strategy. Think of a current question or topic, research it, and write my angle.

Having a strategy like this prevents procrastination. As well as a strategy, I also like to consider keywords that are often used online, tie-ins to one of my current books or courses, and structure.

Structure could be a hierarchy of tips or steps — or once it was a list of Australian self-published authors. This took hours to compile actually, as I had to research whether they were published or self-published. However I did get other author help to get views. (Mentioning author acquaintances is a boon).

Starting out in Marketing as an Author in 2026

A lot of our authors are just new to marketing online; they are writers, specialists or academics. Check out this video for tips on starting out in marketing.

My manual, The Niche Marketing & Book Guide can come free with a purchase of My Personal Brand, which also has a section on authoring. Just type in the Notes on purchasing, “Free Book Guide”.

Plan your marketing with us: marketing & email marketing tools

Who to Learn From in this Space

Pardon my finger. If you only ever watch Tiktok, you could be missing out on important information on building your author platform. Learn from these people:

Mike Kowis – author of “Smart Marketing for Indie Authors” and a bonafide Indie Author. Read my book review.

Michael Hyatt – himself the author of the book “Platform” ages ago. He has moved on to other, more lucrative things.

Joanna Penn – writer of fiction and nonfiction books about book marketing and publishing.

David Gaughran – author of gifted books on platform building and a genuinely nice guy. Author, “Let’s Get Digital”, and this 10-Step Self-publishing guide (more for fiction writers)

Dorie Clark – I enjoyed her audiobook ‘Entrepreneurial You’, which will have you thinking bigger — and wishing you’d gone to Stanford and could call up those in-crowd people too.

A Podcast: Self-Publishing with ALLi