How would you go about marketing fiction books?

I love writing fiction, and I've been considering going the self-publishing route on Kindle. Thing is that I'd like to take a more, shall we say, scientific approach to marketing these books. A large percentage of authors put their books up and hope for the best, which obviously doesn't really work all that well.

There are others who suggest building an author platform, which would pretty much be your own website. The problem I run into here is what the nuts are you going to talk about? If no one knows who you are, no one has ever read a word you've written, why the **** would they care about what you're doing? I say this because some recommend using your site to simply keep readers up to date with what you're doing but they don't really give ideas on how to get those readers.

Educational articles wouldn't work that well either, because I'm not looking to draw in people who want to be fiction writers but people who will want to read my stuff. The only thing I can come up with is posting stories for free but then I run into the traffic problem. How do you drive traffic to a fiction website when you are a nobody?

When I buy a book, I start off with some of my fave authors and then check out Amazon recommendations based on those authors. I rarely read book reviews on other sites. I sometimes read Amazon reviews, but I tend to take those with a grain of salt because I've found books I've loved that most people said sucked and discovered I've hated books that many others loved. And the only time I've visited an author's website was to see what other books they had coming up but this is only after reading something of theirs I liked.

So, I'd really appreciate any tips you might have

And before anyone says to check out what some of the more highly successful fiction writers have done, I have already and it turns out a large percentage of them bought reviews, which has come out now and has definitely not endeared them to their readers.