It may be tempting to go for some free hosting. And honestly, this will get the job done. The downside is you lack some degree of control and whoever runs the hosting can take it away at any time.

Hosting it “yourself” is fairly easy but it does cost a little time and money. About a fiver a month (£5/month) on average plus £10 to £15 a year for the domain name (example.com or example.co.uk).

When it comes to site hosts, there are many, many, many options. Author Buzz uses 20i but you should do your own research. As for software, I’d go with WordPress (wordpress.org) but there are a lot of other options that are just as free and well-maintained. 20i has an inexpensive offering that does the WordPress install stuff for you. (Again, do your own homework first).

This guide covers pretty much all of the author platform topics, webmentions are enabled on all the pages of the guide. Therefore, I suggest to the community, that this could be the host.

This post is part of the (meta) discussion on the OpenMentions author platforms section.

One way to demonstrate platform reach to an agent or publisher is to demonstrate real-world reach. Many local newspapers accept freelance writers to help tell the news. Even ones that do not will often jump on a well-written press release.

Be it by press release or freelance writing, make a point of getting published in your local press. Add clippings or links to a page or section on your website. This will demonstrate that you have reach beyond a Twitter account and an Instagram account. Showing that you know how to reach the people where you live will increase agent or publisher confidence in your author platform.

There is no way to avoid the fact that, as an author today, you will need to learn the basics of marketing. Marketing is one of those things filled with arcane acronyms and weird jargon. That’s why we have a glossary of marketing terms to help you understand the language of selling online.

Book review blogs are a big deal. The most popular review sites have to charge to review book submissions if they even take them at all.

This is something you can leverage to get many book sales. Let me tell you how.

First, invest some time – several months at least. During that time publish good honest reviews of books you have been reading or have read in the last few years.

Second, when you have a good audience of readers following you, you are ready to go to step three. Like platform building as a whole, this step will take time.

Third, reach out to fellow authors with a reasonably sized following of their own. Offer them a simple swap – I will review your book if you review mine. Do this one at a time so you can keep up with the reviews.

This step gives you new books to read and review but also gets you a steady stream of reviews for your book. Encourage the reviewer to link to your page or subsite about your book as well as to your main website.

The links from those reviews will help readers to find you. Furthermore, links tend to raise you up the search results a little bit.

At the very least, each book review that your write will represent one sale to the other author.