Book marketing on social media asks a writer to become a graphic designer, a copywriter and a scheduler, usually in the months when the next book needs writing. Most of what readers enjoy seeing, though, already exists in your story bible: the cast with their portraits, the places, the factions, the lines worth quoting, the map. The work is getting it out of the bible and into a square image without losing an evening to it.
This guide shows how to market a book or a world from your Lokee vault: entity cards, carousels that people swipe to the end, map spotlights, captions and hashtags, a posting rhythm you can keep up, and a public vault as a showcase readers can explore. The example is the demo story The Ashen Circle, set in the walled city of Duskhollow.
Why your story bible is the best book marketing material you have
Readers follow a book on social media for the same reason they reread a favourite: to spend time in the world. A post that says "my book is out" gives them nothing to spend time in. A card for Lady Iseult Varnhold, publicly loyal to the crown and secretly funding the rebels, gives them a person to wonder about.
That card is already half written. If your vault is in decent shape, Iseult has a description, a portrait, attributes, perhaps a pinned quote and tags. The faction she funds has its own entry. Duskhollow is a map. Every one of those is a post, and you wrote them while you were building the world, not while you were trying to sell it.
Two things follow from this. First, the better your bible, the easier your marketing; a story bible that scales pays off twice. Second, whatever you post stays consistent with the book, because it comes from the same source the book does. Nobody discovers in the comments that the eye colour on the card contradicts chapter four.
What can you make in Create?
Every vault has a Create section in its menu, with Creatives and Templates. A creative is one design: a single post, or a carousel of up to 10 slides. Four sizes cover the usual places you post: Square 1080×1080, Portrait 1080×1350, Story 1080×1920 and Landscape 1200×675.
New creative offers three starts:
- From a template opens one of the 14 starter templates or one of your own.
- Blank gives you an empty slide in the size you pick.
- Quick entity card asks for an entity and picks the card that suits its type.
The starters fall into three groups. The entity cards are Character card, Place card, Faction card, Object card and Creature card, laid out like an RPG sheet with a picture, a stat block and lore. The single posts are Quote post, "Who is…?" intro, Relationship spotlight, Map spotlight and On this day in the story. The carousels are Character deep-dive, Cast of characters, World tour of places and Timeline of key events.
The starters are on every plan. You never begin from a white page unless you want to.
Make an entity card in two minutes
Here is the fastest route from vault to post.
- Open Create, then New creative, and choose Quick entity card.
- Search for Lady Iseult Varnhold and pick her. Lokee chooses the Character card because she is a Character, and fills it with her picture, name, type, a stat block from her attributes and her pinned quote, if she has one.
- Look at the result. Double-click any text to change it. Long text shrinks to fit; if it still doesn't, the editor says Text doesn't fit, and that is your cue to shorten the description rather than squint at tiny letters.
- Open Background and try a texture. Parchment suits a manor-house intrigue; Starfield would suit a different book.
- Export, then PNG. Done. On a free account, or signed out, the image carries a small Lokee badge; when you or the vault's owner are on Sync or Pro, it exports clean.
Pick what the card shows
The stat block is your attributes, and that is where most cards go wrong. A character with twenty fields makes an unreadable card. Pick the three or four that make someone curious: for Iseult, her house, her public allegiance and her secret one. Auto-fill already starts small, with the first four short attributes, and never pours in long text. Select the stat block and press Change to tick exactly the ones you want, or use Vault data to drag a single attribute onto the card.
Auto-fill works on any template with slots, not only the quick card. Change the entity and every bound element fills again. Elements you edited by hand are kept, so your rewritten tagline survives; Refill replaces those too when you want a clean start.
Once a card looks right, Save as template. Tick the elements that should become slots, name it ("Ashen Circle character"), and keep it in This vault. Next week's card for Captain Aldric Thorne takes a minute, and the whole series looks like one series. The walkthrough on building your own social media template covers slots, where templates live and template files in detail.
Carousels people swipe to the end, and map spotlights
A carousel is the best format a worldbuilder has, because a world is more than one picture. It is also the easiest to overdo.
Carousels that people swipe to the end
The Cast of characters starter has a title slide and five character slides, one entity per slide. Pick Rowan Ashe, Mira Voss, Captain Aldric Thorne, Lady Iseult Varnhold and Magistrate Ophelia Crane, and auto-fill does the rest. Five faces and five one-line descriptions is a complete introduction to the book's conflict: a scout turned informant, his sister passing messages, his old friend in the Watch, the noblewoman funding it all, and the investigator closing in.
Character deep-dive does the opposite: five slides on one person, with the portrait flowing across the edge between slides one and two. When you drag a picture over the edge between two slides in your own designs, it flows across in the same way when people swipe, which is one of the small tricks that makes a carousel feel designed rather than stacked.
Before exporting, open Preview. Carousel preview shows the slides as a reader will swipe them. If you get bored by slide four, so will they. Cut a slide; carousels hold up to 10, and most are better at five or six.
Export as a ZIP of every slide for apps that take separate images, or as a PDF carousel for the places that take documents.
Map spotlights
Readers love maps, and a full map at phone size is a smudge. A spotlight fixes that by showing one region with the place highlighted.
Add a Map snippet from Elements, or start from the Map spotlight starter. Choose the map of Duskhollow and a named place, say The Undercroft, the tunnels under the old quarter. Set Room around the region so there is enough of the city for context, keep Highlight on, and press Use this region. Add a caption: "Where the Ashen Circle meets. The Crown Watch would give a great deal to find it."
The World tour of places carousel builds on this: a map slide to set the scene, then four places with their pictures and descriptions. If your characters travel, following characters across the map gives you the trail, and the stops on that trail make a natural tour.
Captions, hashtags and music with the AI helpers
The image is half the post. The caption is the other half, and the part writers find oddly hard to write about their own book.
The editor has two small AI helpers. The caption helper writes a post description, a list of hashtags and three background-music ideas (a genre, a mood and example artists or tracks, as text) from your instructions: the tone, the platform, the length, the language, and what to base it on. It costs 1 credit. The template helper designs a new template from a prompt, such as "a wanted poster for a character, sepia, with a reward line", for 3 credits, and you get an ordinary editable design back.
Before anything is sent, Lokee tells you which provider receives the creative's text and the facts about its entities. With Lokee credits, which is the only way in a cloud vault, the helpers need the Pro plan, and in a cloud vault the owner's plan and credits count. In a local vault in the desktop app you can instead use your own AI key or a local model from the vault's AI setup, on any plan and without Lokee credits; with a local model nothing leaves your computer. Results can be copied, put into the design, or saved as a .txt file.
Treat the output as a draft. Two habits help:
- Give it your voice in the instructions. "Dry, a little wry, no exclamation marks, under 60 words" gets you closer than "write a caption".
- Cut the hashtags. The helper gives you a long list on purpose. Keep the handful that describe the book honestly, the genre, the subgenre, one or two reader communities, and drop the rest. A precise tag reaches people who want your kind of book; a vague one reaches nobody in particular.
The music ideas are for the reel or story you might set the images to. They are suggestions in words; Lokee doesn't supply audio.
A posting rhythm you can keep
Consistency matters more than volume, and the right rhythm is the one you are still keeping in month three. Something like this works for a writer with a day job:
| Day | Post | Starter |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | One character or place | Character card, Place card |
| Wednesday | A line or a location | Quote post, Map spotlight |
| Every other Friday | A carousel | Cast of characters, World tour of places, Timeline of key events |
Make a week's creatives in one sitting. With a saved template, three cards take a quarter of an hour, and the Creatives list keeps them with their names until you post them.
Plan around the book. Before launch, post the world: cast, places, factions, the map. Around launch, post the hooks: the "Who is…?" intro for a character readers meet in chapter one, a relationship spotlight for the rivalry the blurb promises. After launch, readers who have finished can take more: On this day in the story for an event in your world's calendar, deeper carousels, the timeline. Keep spoilers out of anything a stranger might see first.
Publish a public vault as a showcase
A post gets a few seconds. A public vault gets an evening from the right reader. Publishing puts a read-only copy of your vault in the public library, where anyone can browse its entities and their cards, the graph of who is connected to whom, the timeline, story events and maps.
It needs the Pro plan and a cloud vault you own, and it happens in the browser: Publish, in the vault's menu under Create. The wizard asks for:
- a Publisher name, chosen once for your account and shown on everything you publish;
- a Category, such as fantasy or original world;
- the Language the vault is written in;
- up to 10 Tags;
- a Title and description, with a cover picked from your entities' images;
- How it was made, a required answer shown to readers as a badge: AI-extracted from a text, AI-generated, Both or Written without AI;
- Readers, two switches for messages and ratings, which you can change later on the Publish page;
- a Preview that counts what will be published and lists what never is.
Submit for review sends the copy to a moderator. You hear back by notification and email. Later changes stay private until you press Publish update, which goes through review again while readers keep seeing the approved version.
Notes, boards, Writer chapters and comments are never published, and that is the line to plan around. Your manuscript stays yours; the world around it is the showcase. Before you publish, decide what the copy should not give away. A public vault for a mystery should not list the murderer's motive as an attribute. The simplest way is a separate cloud vault built for readers, with the spoiler-free version of each entry.
Signed-in readers can rate the vault from 1 to 5 stars, and signed-in readers with a verified email can use Message the author, or Report a mistake about the vault or one of its entities. There are no public comments. Messages arrive in Messages from readers, with a daily email; you can mute a sender, and either switch turns its part off for the vault: with ratings off the stars are hidden, with messages off both buttons are. A reader who reports that a date on the timeline contradicts the book has done you a favour no editor was paid for.
Put the library link in your profile. Every card you post is then a door into the whole world.
Launch month for The Ashen Circle, end to end
Here is how the pieces fit for one book.
Week one: the cast. A Cast of characters carousel with Rowan, Mira, Aldric, Iseult and Ophelia, a saved "Ashen Circle character" template, and two cards made from it: Rowan on Monday, Ophelia the following Monday. The caption helper drafts each caption from "tense, short, no spoilers past chapter one"; you rewrite the first line of each in your own words and keep five hashtags.
Week two: the city. A Map spotlight of The Undercroft, a Place card for The Gilded Lantern ("neutral ground for informants of every allegiance"), and a Quote post with the line from chapter one about the doubled eastern patrol.
Week three: the conflict. A Relationship spotlight of Rowan and Aldric: old friends, opposite sides, and one of them doesn't know it yet. A Faction card for the Ashen Circle and one for the Crown Watch, posted the same day.
Week four: the showcase. A separate, spoiler-free cloud vault goes through Publish: category "Original world", language English, tags such as "political fantasy" and "spy fantasy", the map of Duskhollow as the cover. After approval, the library link goes into your profile and under the launch post. A World tour of places carousel ends with "Explore Duskhollow", and the people who swipe to the end now have somewhere to go.
Everything in that month came out of the vault. Not one fact had to be typed twice.
Common mistakes
Posting the bible instead of the hook. A card with twelve attributes is a spreadsheet. Pick the three facts that make a stranger curious, and leave the rest for the public vault.
Every post a different style. Readers recognise a series by its look. Save your first good card as a template and reuse it.
Spoilers in the stat block. Attributes are the truth about a character, including the parts the book hides until chapter thirty. Check every card for what the reader is not supposed to know yet.
Copying the AI caption as it comes. It doesn't know your voice and it doesn't know which hashtags your readers use. Edit the first line and cut the tags.
Publishing the working vault. Your working vault is full of half-decided facts. Publish a vault you would be happy for a reader to quote back at you.
What Lokee doesn't do here
Lokee makes the images and the words; it doesn't post them. There is no scheduling, no direct posting to Instagram, TikTok or anywhere else, no analytics and no video export. The music ideas are text, not audio. The helpers don't know what is trending this week, so trend-chasing is yours to do. A public vault shows your content in the language you wrote it in; it isn't translated for readers. Templates can be shared as files, but there is no public template gallery yet. For the full picture of what the app covers and where it stops, see how Lokee helps with worldbuilding.
In five minutes
- Open Create, choose New creative, then Quick entity card, and make a card for your most interesting character.
- Trim the stat block to three facts and Save as template.
- Make a five-slide carousel of the cast and check it in Preview.
- Draft a caption, then rewrite its first line yourself and keep a handful of hashtags.
- Set a rhythm: one card, one quote or map, a carousel every other week.
- When the world is ready to be seen, publish a spoiler-free vault and link it from your profile.
The Create help section and the publishing help section cover every button and limit. Plans and what each includes are on the pricing page.