Building A Fiction Author Platform In 2026: Lessons From Publishing Dark Granny

Building a fiction author platform in 2026 is a fundamentally different game than it was a decade ago, evolving from basic promotion into a robust, data-driven ecosystem. In this episode, we pull back the curtain on the modern author’s toolkit, exploring how to leverage AI-assisted branding, targeted sales funnels, and strategic book launches to maximize reach without relying on outdated tactics. Whether you are a first-time novelist or a seasoned writer looking to modernize your promotion, you will learn the exact systems—from crafting effective landing pages and navigating algorithmic changes to executing high-converting book swaps—that turn an unknown manuscript into a sustainable, consistent business.

—

Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Building A Fiction Author Platform In 2026: Lessons From Publishing Dark Granny

The Evolution Of Fiction Platforms: 2010 Vs. 2026

Welcome to the show. in this episode, I’m going to talk about a new book that I just put out called Dark Granny. Those of you who are on my email list or social media probably already know that this is my first mystery novel that I have written in many years. I probably should not write. I should probably say published because I’ve been writing all along. Now that my kids are out of the house and married. I decided it’s time to take out those old manuscripts, speak them up and get them published.

The reason I wanted to do the episode is not because of my book directly. I’m not here to sell you my book. Although, if you want to buy it, it’s available on Amazon. I want to talk about all the differences in building a platform for fiction in 2026 versus 2010 because I’m astounded but in a good way. Everything has come so far. Back in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 when I was publishing mystery novels. The only tools out there were Amazon tools.

We hadn’t dove into funnels yet. They weren’t ads or Amazon ads. There weren’t ads of any kind. There were just free book giveaways and getting the word out via social media to your friends. Social media didn’t even work the same way it did now. You had pretty minimal exposure back then. As far as getting out, if you had to hire someone for PR. We didn’t have a podcast. You couldn’t do the booking. Some people had a blog. Not many. A few had websites. All of the things that have transpired over the years are exciting changes.

I want to talk about that a little bit. For those of you who are trying to build a platform, I’m going to give you some clues on what I did with mine. With owning a publishing company, I know a lot more than I did back then. I started my publishing company back then because the self-publisher that I used was so bad. Their idea of promotion was, “Get yourself a business card and get yourself bookmarkers.” That was it. They sold websites, but they were really bad websites. I’m going to give you an example of how bad it is.

I had a series back then. The website could only handle one book at a time. Think of it this way. I could put Granny Heist or whatever book it was up but I had to have individual websites. Let’s say I went to a web builder, which was very expensive back then. Even way more expensive than now, but here’s the kicker. It was a “free site” but the hosting fees were like $45 a month. At the end of the year, you paid for a non-flexible, worthless website that promoted one book. It had basically a landing page with a, “Hit this and go into Amazon,” and buy the book. That was it.

You paid $500 a year or more just to have this site up. It was incredibly bad. I didn’t find that out until I put my second book out and I wanted to add it. They’re like, “This is not flexible. You can’t do that at all.” Technology has come a long way. My first book back then, I sold about 150 to 200 copies. To be honest, my grandmother bought both of them. When she died, I cleaned out my house and I found a lot of them there. In fact, all the copies I still have. It came from my grandmother’s house. It was a horrible book.

It wasn’t worth buying. My first editor was Stephen King’s editor or former editor at the time. You guys who have written books will love this. I didn’t get to send a PDF or a Word doc via email. I had to print the entire manuscript, mail it and mail it with a return envelope inside. When I opened it up, when I got it back from editing, I almost cried. It was covered in red. It was so bad. I had to go into that manuscript and make those changes one by one and there were a lot of them.

Building The Modern Author Tech Stack: Funnels And Landing Pages

Why I find this so weird now is because if you’ve sent something off to an editor, probably in the last ten years, it comes back. It’s on Word and it’s beautiful. They market and comment. Everything is done there. You accept it or you reject it. You didn’t have to go in and make all of this one by one. Here’s what I’ve noticed has changed tremendously and I’m grateful for it as well. The number one thing is we now have systems that do funnels so we can build our own sites. If we have the knowledge, we can build our own landing pages.

I built my site over a weekend on my GoHighLevel account. All of my social media is served from there. I have landing pages for the book that are individualized that I can use to promote. I also have lots of buttons on the site. The things I have on the site is my homepage, which has Dark Granny. It has a downloadable free book which is The Fortune Teller’s Daughter, which is coming out in June on Amazon. I have the next book Farmhouse Forgotten. I’ve got a button sitting there saying “Coming soon.” I’ve got Bad Lie which is the book that’s coming out in August, sitting there as well.

That is at the editor. Farmhouse Forgotten in minor rewrite after the editor. That was another thing I found great. I went back and rewrote a couple of my old books. They might have a different ending. They might have a few different characters but the overall archived that, the reason I rewrote them. I’m a much better writer in 2026 than I was in 2008, 2009, and 2010. Back then, show versus tell wasn’t my forte. It’s that way for a lot of authors who are naturals at this learning that show versus talent.

Sometimes I even catch myself going back in the rewrites and relying heavily on that talking head dialogue to tell the story. There are other things that I can incorporate into tell that story. You all need a website. You all need the funnel. The nice thing about GoHighLevel is I know how to build websites there, so I build my own. I built it in a weekend and I’m going to tell you guys something shocking. I used Perplexity to build it. What is that mean?

I had a vision. I set the books in. I said, “Make me a brand guide.” It made me a beautiful brand guide. My son is in the process of writing some books. I showed him the brand guide, and he’s like, “Mom, that is so cool. Can you do it for me?” Now he has a brand guide based on his books. All that was is how do our cover stay consistent? We designed all the covers to be on brand and the colors on the website. I used a version of a very dark blue, a lighter dark blue and gold because they are mystery novels. I want something a little bit creepy.

We went to images that were a little bit mystery-oriented. That was another wonderful thing about AI. We did it on AI. The prompts make it look very mystery-like. If you go look at the website, it’s JulietDillonClark.com. They’ll see that we took the back template from the cover on The Fortune Teller’s Daughter and made that the header so that it does look very procedural mystery novel-looking. All of that was there.

Storytelling Secrets: Mastering Your About Page And Brand Identity

Next, we moved on to the about page. I didn’t want some boring story about, “I graduated and I do this. I will do that.” We did a lot of storytelling on the page. A little about what I did now but a lot of the genesis of the series. Why do I like mysteries? One of my big things in the quote that AI picked out that I love is I’ve always been a puzzle person. Whether it is sudoku which I hate. I don’t do it very much or just a crossword puzzle in my hand. Even those cardboard puzzles you do at the table. I love them all. For me, that love has translated to writing mystery novels because mystery novels are just puzzles.

The nice thing about people’s puzzles is they are unpredictable. It’s not like sitting down and the crossword has one answer or the puzzle pieces in the cardboard fit together in a particular way. It’s that people’s connection where that unpredictability or those people who behave one way in public and behave another behind the scenes. You get to see and use your instincts about people. That’s why I love reading mystery novels as well. Sometimes, I’ll know the bad guy in advance and I can choose it. What is the story about how we got there?

If you look at the about page, there’s a lot of storytelling there. For those of you who don’t know, I used to have a friend who was a Los Angeles County Sheriff. She used to share stories with me. She didn’t tell me inside information but she worked with what she called the beat. That’s how she called the mystery. Her territory was Malibu for a very long time and some of the stories she would tell me. I can remember there was one about Gary Busey that I just died laughing at.

I was like, “Really? That’s what he does all day? He sits up there and drinks and screams down at the people below?” The cast of characters has a lot of realistic to it as well as the hiking experience. When I lived in Los Angeles, I used to hike down at Calabasas, like all over the place. I sold real estate in a lot of those places as well like the higher end communities. There’s a lot of insider stuff about how those people live compared to how a little blue-collar girl lived growing up. There are a lot of differences.

Also, the small town distinction. I grew up and moved to big city places but I grew up in a small town. I couldn’t wait to flee because if you’ve ever lived in a small town, everybody knows everybody’s business. The old folks can remember back when, “So and so was like this. Now, he’s this” Always willing to tell those stories to us. On the about page, there’s a lot of storytelling. I have a page for my books. I have my mystery books in one place. My other books are on my regular website.

Algorithmic Advantage: Fiction Launch Strategies And Audience Growth

Even though I just wanted a word for the Perfect Reader Playbook, I didn’t feel like the place for that was on the mystery side. You can bet that I am in the background submitting Dark Granny and some of those other books for awards. That is currency these days in the book world. If you guys have been reading the previous episodes. You know that Amazon changed the way they do their algorithms. Now, they are rewarding those platform builders and disregarding those big spikes. That was part of my launch strategy as well is, how do I roll out this fiction launch strategy so I don’t get spiked, so I have consistent sales.

I’ll talk a little bit about that. Some of those great tools that are out there, they do that. As soon as I have media for the books, I will be putting that up, including this show. Probably before it even comes out. I’ll probably have a video over there on the media to talk about it. That’s important, too. Back to The Fortune Teller’s Daughter free copy. That is to build a mystery email list. That’s essential as well. You need to update your followers between books. You don’t want it to be all sales. There’s a lot of things I’ll be putting inside of that email list into a newsletter of some sort.

The nice thing is, too, now that I’m doing book swaps. I will be featuring some of those other authors over on my Breakthrough Author Magazine. I do have the ability to feature. That was one of the things when I set up a book of the week. It won’t be my clients. It will be doing book swaps with some of those others. I dare say. I bet I have a bigger list of Breakthrough Author Magazine and a lot of those authors do. I do feel like that promotion and a swap will be a good selling point to get people to do swaps with me as well.

Clear genre branding. The one thing I said about that brand guide. Have a brand guide. You don’t have to go to a phone fancy-shancy branding expert for this. If you can do the right prompts inside of your ChatGPT, Claude, or whatever you use. I love Perplexity. You will be able to get a nice brand guide. What I didn’t tell you was, when I went to the website, I said, “I just GoHighLevel. This is what I want. I set all my books in. I set the brand guide in.” I also said to it even though I know how to build, “Tell me specifically how to build this.”

Every single segment on my site, I had clear instructions such as pull down a single, put in a text box, make your text this size. Everything. It’s probably one of the best sights I’ve ever built because I had step by step instructions. I did make a few variances in it because it may sound good on paper, but it wasn’t great to my eye the way I see things. If you do that, use your intuition in your eyes but don’t get fancy with it.

Optimizing Discovery: Pinterest, Outsourcing, And Social Media

That is the number one thing I see on a lot of sites, whether they’re fiction or nonfiction. We try to get in these clever lines that nobody understands. Be sure your copy on this is great as well. A limited number of discovery channels where authors spend time. This is the part I hate that I haven’t done yet, but I probably will need to get a Pinterest account. I have been avoiding it like the plague because I don’t spend much time on social media. I have a team that does that and I did that because it’s easy for me to get sucked in and spend and waste time.

That’s why I let my team do it and they do everything. I probably will have to do that with Pinterest because I’m telling you, people. Back when I used to spend a lot of time on Pinterest, I kid you not, I would pin those recipes and workouts. If I truly did all of it, I would be a 400-pound fitness model. I know that sounds like, “What? You can’t be a fitness model when you’re 400-pounds.” You’re right about that, but I do love to work out and eat and try new recipes. That’s what I did over there.

I didn’t buy a whole lot of things, but I could spend hours. I could spend a whole evening on Pinterest. That’s why. If I do open my social media accounts, I may put together some of the posts. I cracked my own emails but I left the team to take care of it. If you’re someone who’s saying, “I’m a fiction author. I don’t have a lot of money. This is my side gig or my side hustle.” Go over to Upwork. There are a lot of good people there. One of my assistants is over on Upwork. He’s $5 an hour.

You can vet them great. He speaks amazing English. He grew up in the UK. He was in Indianapolis as team of 30 people. There’s no excuse why you can’t get help like that even on a budget. Giving them two hours a week for $5 to run your social media and your email list. All good. I personally like GoHighLevel. I was a little insulted when someone told me that was the “flavor of the week.” I’ve gone through a lot of systems in my time in the publishing business and it is the most user-friendly, robust system that I have seen.

I would have avoided Wix. Wix is a marketing light. A lot of people want to start there, but I always say, “Go where you can grow.” You don’t want to have to rebuild everything someplace else. I have a client who’s in the midst of that. We’re building over on GoHighLevel because the team that builds for him originally did not build for growth. It wasn’t a lead magnet. When I asked them like, “Where are we going to put this lead magnet we created for my client?” Their idea was to zap a list into GoHighLevel because my client already had GoHighLevel.

We’re in the process of rebuilding a whole new site for him because you want some place to grow. If you go someplace light just to save my money, I get it. Aren’t you telling the universe that, “I’m not sure this is going to work out.” I’ll be a risk taker if you want to do well in business. A risk taker with common sense. How’s that? A limited number of discovery channels. We will probably have to go to Pinterest. Unfortunately, I’m back on Facebook. Even though I am for Facebook. Facebook or Meta or whatever we call it.

I’m not on X anymore. I built my bones on X back in 2009 or 2010. A lot of traction over there. It’s garbage now. Sorry, Elon Musk. That’s just one big food fight. It’s people brawling all day and I don’t want that drama in my life. Which is why my team runs all this now, because I don’t need it. Strong back cover matter in the back of the book. We wrote and rewrote all those back covers. What worked in 2010 doesn’t work now. People are much more sophisticated. We had to take the back cover. We built them plus content, which was a little tricky for mystery.

If anybody from Amazon is reading, here me. When you write murder mysteries, there will be words like dead, gun, crime, scene, and blood. All of that is going to be in. It took me a little bit of rewording. I finally wrote them a note and said, “What up,” and got the approvals through. I have to tell you. A plus content is fun. I used a new AI program to create the graphics for it and I was excited about that. I paid $120 for it for the whole year. It’s called Recraft.io and it is probably the best one I found. I use FAL.ai, but a lot of times, I just get garbage back from it. If I’m asking it to write something on a banner, I get garbage. It doesn’t do the words well.

I loved Recraft and I’m going to keep you saying it. I did enjoy it. Keep all of that in mind. As you’re putting out your emails, make sure they have a nice banner on it. Make sure they have good headlines. Learn how to write good emails that are very engaging so that people stay on your list. Why do all these elements matter? That’s what we’re doing these days, versus the other. Thank God that I had all of that in my pocket and already knew that.

The Launch Protocol: Executing Campaigns, Ads, And Book Swaps

Now, I’m going to get to the part about the launch and the campaign. This is where I am so grateful that so many trailblazers have been out there building different things that are helping with this launch. Our first launch protocol is, I have a big goal here. I would like a traditional contract for the series. I asked Perplexity about a particular platform that I want to get to the series on. I have my reasons for doing it. I don’t want to share it because I don’t want it out there.

If they know this, because they’ll go, “I don’t know. She crafted the whole planet around this and she’s going to share it with everybody and everybody’s going to want it. We’ll have to change.” One of the milestones was 100 pre-sales. I seated that with not only my list, but I got commitments from friends and family to buy to get me to the 100 milestone in pre-sale. Now, why did I do that? It’s hard in fiction because with non-fiction, you’ve been building an audience. You have a business. The pre-sale is not as difficult to get 100.

With fiction, if you’re an unknown and this is your first book. I am treating this like a first book. Nobody knows me from many years ago. I had to find people to make that commitment. There aren’t many programs out there pre-sale for these things. Most of the campaigns that I’m running are post-sale. What usually happens is, in pre-sale, you get a bomb and then it drops after about the second week. Any of you guys who have been following the Perfect Reader Playbook know that. That is always the challenge for authors. It’s going gangbusters.

There’s a spike, which Amazon is not treating. They don’t want to see. I’m putting it out there. The 100 pre-sale, I have that commitment. People already started to buy before and they showed me what they bought so that I could keep track of the numbers. That was fantastic because I could take that and go back in and match. I made friends and family for my 100 launch. I had a strategy that got me to 100 without anybody else being involved. Anybody else through my list or those variables is unknown appreciated.

One of the things that I did with this in pre-sale, though. I went back to my list for non-fiction. I announced the book was coming out and I gave them a free gift if they brought me back the receipt for the book. I gave them a free copy of The Fortune Teller’s Daughter that’s coming out in June 2026. Why did I do that? First of all, I wanted them to read it. I wanted to have a free gift. Second of all, I’m going to keep up the Dark Granny campaign and then go back and redo with the exception of the pre-sale. I don’t care as much about the pre-sale now.

I can go back to friends and family and do this again with my pre-sale on The Fortune Teller’s Daughter. I’m going to run the same campaigns with adjustments that I did for Dark Granny launch and post-release. I’m going to be doing that over the next four months. Everyone that comes back, I’m going to be doing the same campaign. Only structuring it a little bit different because I will learn something from Dark Granny. I will learn what to adjust and I will do that on The Fortune Teller’s Daughter.

If I see other things there that go forward with Farmhouse Forgotten, I will make adjustments. By the time I get to Bad Lie in the August 2026 release, I will be putting that into a book award since it is a brand new book. Also, by then I should have the protocols down and who knows? I may find some new things I can add as well. What did I do? I hope I get these right. The first thing I did was Amazon ads. Amazon ads will start on launch. I did Amazon ads two ways. I did one with keywords and another with like authors.

I had Perplexity run me a list based on the sound, the way my books were written, my voice and my tone. It came back and told me who those authors that were like me were. I was pleasantly surprised because I read a lot of those authors. I thought it was good news. I don’t know that I feel like it matches theirs because I’ve been writing for years. That was never my intention, but I do like that it was there. I put those authors into the ad. Those started in May 12th and have been running.

The second thing I did was I went to BookBub and I booked ads there. I did a campaign that started on June 18th. I gave myself a month there and ran another campaign. Also, I did some things on BookFunnel. I’m doing book swaps. What is a book swap? When you go over, there are seven authors who have lists that they are willing to do a swatch. If you have a list, they will do a book mention. I’m doing exclusive for the books that I do book swaps with in my email or in my newsletter. There are a lot of things like that you can do.

That’s all the more reason why you should build this list while you’re writing in advance. If you have the large list, you have leverage to do those swaps. For me, in 2020, that was the way I built my show. I built my numbers. I built my interviews. I went in because remember, we were all at home. We didn’t get to have in-person events. I went through LinkedIn and found people with podcasts and offered pod swaps. A lot of them did that.

The Long Game: Budgeting, Persistence, And Lifetime Book Sales

A pod swap is where I invite them on my show and they invite me on their show. We’re basically exposing ourselves to different audiences. Same concept here. These are people who have built a list. They built an audience and they’re willing to share and you share as well. That was one of my strategies. Also, we’re running ads to mystery enthusiasts. If they’re targeted outside of Amazon, one thing I would never do is Google ads. That’s a big waste of money. We have a lot of things that we’re doing that are ongoing. The one thing people don’t remember is that a book is a lifetime commitment.

I know for a lot of my non-fiction authors who haven’t built a platform, they get frustrated by this because the sales drop. They assume that people would just find them. It doesn’t take them more than about 60-90 days to give up the ghost on that and quit promoting. I encourage you in this process to utilize whatever AI platform you’re doing with your non-fiction book and be able to figure out what the right platforms are for you. Again, it’s a budget issue. Make sure you budget those ads.

I know with either the BookFunnel or the BookBub ad, I am giving it a very short period of time for a test. I put $20 in. I’m running a test for five days. I want to see the efficiency before I spend a bunch of money. That’s another area. You can test ads in. June 18th, 2026, is on a different platform. I went to BookSirens, and I was rejected, so I went to another platform. Why was I rejected from BookSirens? More than likely, because I didn’t have reviews yet.

I will be going back to BookSirens but I did find another platform that does something very similar that did accept that I couldn’t get in. They have about a month’s lead time. I couldn’t get in until June 18th, 2026. Look around at those different things. Utilize AI to find out what you should be doing and then budget appropriately. I’m a little scared by my budget. I literally went back into my AI and I said, “I need more clients.” I also have some other goal I’m building that I need extra cash for.” Make sure that you have the appropriate budget for this.

Protecting Your Intellectual Property: Copyright and Self-Publishing Best Practices

Make sure that you are getting a good editor and you have a good formatter. Be sure that you have all of those things in place like good coverage design. Catchy coverage design, but the design build-out is there. There are a lot of things that are in play here. I know a lot of fiction authors go the self-publish route. This is important for them to figure out those costs in advance. Here’s what I wouldn’t recommend. Don’t go over to Fiverr. You’re going to get your book stolen. Don’t do anything wacky like that.

I had an author who shared with me that all of her books are out of beta readers. That’s amazing. I said, “You filed the copyright, when?” She hasn’t filed it. She had her book out there without filing. As many of you who are readers know, a good book developer came to me in a tizzy because she had a self-published author who didn’t file her copyright. Somewhere in the process, her book got stolen. We don’t know if it was formatters or a cover design or her computer got hacked. The bottom line was, somebody else published her book under their name and had no idea. There’s nothing she can do about it because she didn’t file that copyright.

I just wanted to talk about that a little bit because I am pleasantly surprised. As someone who develops marketing programs for authors to be able to get more bangs for their buck. I’m excited to see that this has happened in the fiction world and there are other people doing this as well. You guys have probably seen Adanna Moriarty and her partner, Kathleen Kaiser on my show. They developed a program that can help self-published authors get their metadata right and their social media.

There are people out there doing this in a big way. You just need to explore and find those people. I hope I didn’t bore you all to death but I wanted to share that because platform building doesn’t matter if it’s fiction or non-fiction. It is important. Amazon feels it’s important enough that they’re rewarding those people. A lot of those things I mentioned are clicks from external sources which Amazon loves and rewards now. Until the next episode. Thank you.

Important Links

• JulietDillonClark.com
• Dark Granny
• GoHighLevel
• Perplexity
• Perfect Reader Playbook
• Recraft.io
• BookBub
• BookFunnel
• BookSirens

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!

• Here’s How »

• superbrandpublishing.com
• Promote, Profit, Publish on YouTube
• Follow Juliet on LinkedIn
• Take the Quiz!