Storiad Author Marketing Guide
A book marketing plan sounds like the kind of thing that needs a binder and a consultant. It doesn't. A plan that works is usually one page: who your book is for, the few things you'll do to reach them, when you'll do them, and how you'll know if any of it is working.
The point of writing it down isn't to look organized. It's to stop promoting at random. Without a plan, most authors do whatever feels urgent that week, burn out, and conclude that marketing "doesn't work." With one, you make a handful of deliberate moves and can see which ones earn their keep.
This is the structure, not the tactics. If you want the specific moves — what to fix on your book page, how to build an email list, where to find new readers — start with how to market a book or, if you're independent, how to market a self-published book. This guide is the page you put those moves on so they happen in the right order, on a schedule, within a budget. Here's how to build it.
"Sell more books" isn't a goal — it's a wish. A goal has a number and a deadline you can actually check against: 500 copies in the first three months, 100 email subscribers before launch, 25 reviews by the end of the quarter.
Pick one primary goal for this season. A single clear target tells you which of the ideas below belong in your plan and which are distractions you can ignore for now.
Every useful marketing decision flows from one question: who is this book for? Not "anyone who likes a good story" — that's no one. Picture the actual reader: what they already read, where they spend time online, whose recommendations they trust. The sharper your answer, the easier every later line of the plan becomes, because you're choosing channels and timing for a specific person instead of guessing.
Write that reader down in a sentence or two. That sentence is what the rest of the plan answers to.
This is where most plans go wrong. There are dozens of ways to promote a book, and trying to run all of them at once is the surest path to doing none of them well. The planning decision isn't which tactics exist — it's how few you can commit to. Pick two or three channels and put the rest on a "maybe later" list.
A simple way to choose: weight toward what you own. An email list and your book's retailer page are channels no algorithm can take away, so they earn a spot first. Add one outward channel you can actually sustain, whether that's a single social platform, a podcast tour, or a niche community. One you'll keep up beats five you abandon by week two. The how-to for each lives in the guides above; the plan just names the two or three that are yours.
A plan without dates is just a wish list. Split your timeline into three phases and slot your activities into each:
You don't need a fancy tool for this. A few dated lines under each phase is a real plan.
Decide up front what you can spend. Money matters, but the bigger cost is usually the hours each week, so set a limit before promotion quietly takes over your life. Some of the highest-return moves — emailing your list, asking for reviews, fixing your retailer metadata — cost nothing but time. If you do spend, paid options like genre newsletter features or targeted ads can work, but only as fuel behind a launch you've already prepared. Start small, measure, and scale up only what pays off.
Pick a few numbers tied to your goal and check them on a schedule — monthly is plenty. Email subscribers, reviews, sales during a promo, traffic to your book's page. The aim isn't a dashboard full of charts; it's to learn which two or three things are actually moving copies so you can do more of those and quietly drop the rest.
Goal: (one number, one deadline)
Reader: (who they are, what they read, where they spend time)
Channels: (the two or three you'll commit to)
Calendar: (pre-launch / launch week / after launch — a few dated lines each)
Budget: (money and hours per week)
Metrics: (the handful of numbers you'll check monthly)
Fill in those six lines and you have a book marketing plan. Revisit it every month or two, keep what's working, and cut what isn't.
A plan is only as good as your follow-through, and the follow-through is where most authors stall — researching who to contact, building the media kit, sending the outreach, and tracking what came back. That's the work Storiad is built to carry: it gives you one place to organize your contacts, assemble a media kit you can send in a click, run your outreach, and watch which efforts actually move copies, so the plan on your page becomes work that gets done.
.png)
