Archive for August, 2010

I’ve said it before: an author website is a MUST. Even if your publisher has an author page for you on their website, it’s not enough. After all, a publisher’s goal is to sell your book. Your goal should be to sell yourself (and your book, too). Big difference.

With that in mind, I was asked a question recently that left me stumped. And I was hoping that a hearty conversation might help me figure it out.

An author asked me about his obligation to his publisher in terms of the website. For instance, should he use the publisher as the preferred vendor for selling his book through the website? Or is it okay to list all the sites where the book could be purchased (Amazon, B&N, etc…) and just include the publisher’s site in that list?

Is it okay to just include the name of the book publishing company on the one page of the site where the pub details are listed? Or should the company name and pub date be present wherever the book cover sits?

I must confess that I have never thought much about this. Nor have I heard about any publishers complaining about not enough prominence on an author’s website.

But it’s an interesting question. What’s common courtesy? What’s “the right thing to do”? Or does an author have no obligation at all to his publisher?

Share your thoughts!

In doing my weekly browsing of any and all articles, blog posts, etc… related to author websites, I came across a HUGE number of pieces this week having to do with the website for author Jennifer Egan. She’s covered in the New York Times. She’s reviewed by The Quincy Review. In short, she’s everywhere. And good for her!

Doesn’t every author wish they were getting a plug in the NY Times? I can’t even imagine what her site traffic (and book sales!) look like this past week.

So I’m going to jump on the Jennifer Egan bandwagon today and discuss — in my humble opinion — what has made her site the hottest topic of conversation in the literary world.

Her website design is really unique. Which is always a plus. The stripes of colors seem to really represent her personality. The way the letters of her name fall over the stripes is also pretty cool. It’s definitely different from any other author site.

Jennifer also has a lot of fun things elements throughout the site — from photos to videos. The site is more of a fun collection of pictures and words, instead of an information source.

But I’d venture to say that it’s her homepage that has really gotten the world buzzing. Everything else on the website could pretty much be replicated in a different design and no one would notice.

On Jennifer’s homepage is a curious series of places and dates. They’re scattered across the homepage in kind of a hodgepodge. And there’s hardly anything else (except a navigation, which isn’t all that prominent) that’s visible when you first arrive.

So, of course, you’re going to click on those dates/places to figure out what they are. And when you do, you get a story from Jennifer on how her experience in the time and place that you clicked on inspired her to write one of her stories. You then get to read the beginning of the story that her experience prompted her to write.

It’s a simple, yet brilliant, idea. The homepage entices you to figure out what those dates mean, and by clicking on them you get fun stories — that you can only find on the website — about what’s behind her writing.

I’d put good money on the fact that it’s this simple feature that made Jennifer the talk of the town. It just goes to show you what one creative idea can do for a website. Web design is important. But just as important is coming up with unique ideas for website content, usability and presentation. Find the right formula — as Jennifer did — and you’ll be a hit.

Ready to talk with us about building your own author website? Contact us today for a free consultation!

In case you missed my post a few days ago, I provided some really interesting details from Bowker’s newly-released “2009 Book Consumer Annual Review: U.S. Demographics & Buying Behaviors.” Click here to read it.

What I touched on a bit in that post, but would like to expand on here, is the segment on what makes people buy books. By understanding that, we can have a much better idea on how to market our own books.

Here’s a segment-by-segment breakdown of the brief PW report on the subject and an analysis of each point:

The study found topic/subject and author to be the two most important motivating factors, although there was a distinct difference between fiction and nonfiction. The author was the single most important reason consumers chose a novel, while subject was the top buying factor for nonfiction titles.

This is something I’ve been saying for a while. Marketing a fiction book is completely different from marketing a non-fiction book. In some ways, non-fiction is easier to sell, since you have a ready-made audience of people looking for information on a certain topic. Personally, I love reading books about politics. I’ll buy a political book, but not necessarily a self-help book. I’m sure every non-fiction fan has their own section of the bookstore they head to. The key is to catch the eye of the reader who already is looking for books in your genre.

Fiction is a completely different story. People usually choose to read a novel because it’s what their friends are reading. Or because they’re a fan of the author. In this sense, an author website (as opposed to a book website) is even more essential for a fiction author. This study proves the importance of keeping your readers interested and occupied so that when your next book comes out, they’re around to find out about it.

“The author” finished below “browsing through a book” as a reason for buying a nonfiction work.

This sentence in particular points to the importance of featured excerpts. While people traditionally browse through a book in a bookstore, that’s a lot harder to do online. Which is even more reason why you MUST have featured excerpts on your website. For nonfiction authors, I usually recommend that they include more than one featured excerpt — giving a reader more of a browsing experience. One thing I commonly recommend is a table of contents, with various chapter names linking to brief excerpts from those chapters. For fiction authors, one long excerpt makes a lot of sense. Less so for non-fiction authors, and this seems to back that up.

The most common way consumers became aware of a title in 2009 was at a store through an in-store display, with recommendation the second most popular.

This doesn’t distinguish between fiction and non-fiction, but I’ll tackle it anyway. An in-store display is great. And we can always try and replicate something similar online. By getting your book in people’s faces as much as possible, you’ll be able to accomplish what’s close to an in-store display. So get your book reviewed (and your cover displayed) on as many websites and blogs as possible. Get links to your website worked in whenever you do interviews or write articles. Create your own display of sorts!

With hundreds of thousands of new books on the market,  it can be quite a challenge to get yours to stand out. But, hopefully, this information will give us a place to start!

Ready to talk with us about marketing your book online? Contact us today for a free consultation!

Bowker recently released the “2009 Book Consumer Annual Review: U.S. Demographics & Buying Behaviors.” It was based on responses from 43,000 people in book publishing. And while it would cost you a whopping $1,000 to download and read the complete report, here are some highlights, courtesy of Publishers Weekly. This is some pretty interesting information for people who are trying to decide whether to publish an e-book, whether to try and get their book carried in bookstores, etc…

What’s Selling

• Chain bookstores accounted for 27% of unit sales in 2009, while the e-commerce segment represented 21% of units sold.
• The only other channel to have at least a 10% share of the market was book clubs, which had an 11% share.
• The bookstore chains’ leadership position was more pronounced when sales are measured in dollars, with the chains grabbing 37% of dollar volume, while e-tailers, which discount heavily, taking 19% of dollars spent.
• The study found Barnes & Noble to be the largest seller of print titles, with a 15% share of units purchased compared to 13% for Amazon and 10% for Borders.
• Adult fiction was the largest of the major categories in 2009, generating 40% of units sold, although only 28% of the dollar volume due in part to the large number of fiction books that are sold as low-priced mass market paperbacks.
• Young adult (boosted by Stephenie Meyer) and general fiction were the two largest subgenres, accounting for 8% of unit sales each last year. Romance and thriller/espionage each had a 6% share of units.
• Paperbacks accounted for 59% of units sold in 2009, while hardcovers represented 36% of units.
• E-books accounted for only 1.7% of unit volume in the year and a little more than 2% of dollars.
• E-book buyers are using e-tailers to buy both their print and digital titles. In the first quarter of 2009, 37% of e-book buyers bought print books online, a figure that rose to 55% in the first period of 2010.

Who’s Buying

• Eighty-one percent of both unit sales and dollar volume in 2009 came from consumers who had at least some college education.
• Women generally buy more books than men. But not by the percentages you might think. In the Matures age bracket—readers born before 1948, men accounted for 48% of units and 54% of dollars spent, while in the Baby Boomer group (born between 1948 and 1966), men also accounted for 54% of dollar volume, although their unit market share was only 43%.
• Examining why consumers buy books, the study found topic/subject and author to be the two most important motivating factors, although there was a distinct difference between fiction and nonfiction.
• The most common way consumers became aware of a title in 2009 was at a store through an in-store display, with recommendation the second most popular.

Interesting information, right? I’ll post another entry in a few days further delving into why people buy specific books, but this is some good information to absorb as you begin your book publishing and book marketing endeavors.

Want to speak with us about developing an author website? Contact us today for a free consultation!

I once posted a blog entry where I said it was never too early — and never too late — to build an author website. I may have to amend that.

I was contacted the other day by an author who was considering building a website. She was working on her first book and had been doing a little research on what it would take to get that book published. She’d heard that an author website was a must, so she contacted me.

I started asking her questions about what the book was about. Who it was for. She wasn’t really able to answer. She said that it was still in the early stages and really could change a great deal before it was completed.

And so, for the first time ever, I said what I never thought I would. I told this woman that she may want to get closer to finishing her manuscript before building a website.

Because until you know who you’re writing for and the genre of your book, then what can a website accomplish? You don’t know yet who you’re speaking to. You don’t know who your audience will be. You don’t even know which division of a publishing house you’d want to reach!

So, maybe there is such a thing as too early for an author website. Although, I must say that in four years of doing this, I’ve never encountered this type of situation before.

It never hurts to inquire about an author website. But you should at least know what type of writer you are before launching an author site or a book site. Otherwise, you may build something that doesn’t really suit your final product.

You live, you learn!

Ready to talk with us about building you an author website or a book website? Contact us today for a free consultation!

If you had a website built through Smart Author Sites in the last few years, then you should be receiving a Google Analytics report on the 1^st of each month with your website traffic numbers. Even if you built your author site elsewhere, you may be checking up on your site traffic report regularly.

But what do the numbers mean? How should an author – a master of words – know how to interpret all those facts and figures?

First, since I’m writing this post in August, I feel the need to start with a caveat. Chances are, if you received a site traffic report recently, you were disappointed. Your numbers probably went down from May to June and again from June to July. But don’t despair! Just as TV watching decreases in the summer (hence, so few new shows), so does internet usage. It’s common knowledge that the nicer the weather, the more people want to spend time outdoors instead of in front of the computer. So it’s totally normal for your site traffic to slow down this time of year. Odds are it will pick up again in September.

Now, onto what your stats really mean….

• Visits, Unique Visitors and Pageviews: People often get confused by these three things. So here’s the scoop: “Unique visitors” refers to the number of individuals (okay, computers), who visited your site. This will undoubtedly be the lowest number of the three. Then there’s “visits,” which is the number of times people visited your site. So if 100 unique visitors visited your site an average of 2 times in a month, they would show up as 200 visits. And “pageviews” refers to the number of pages on your site that were viewed. So if those 100 visitors (who each visited twice) looked at an average of 5 pages each time they visited your site, your number of pageviews would be 1,000. Get it?
• When People Visit: Another important stat to look at is when you got your traffic. Try to figure out if there’s a correlation between the days when your numbers where the highest and any marketing efforts that took place. If you sent out an email blast, that could boost your traffic on a particular day. Same thing if you did a radio show. But by figuring out what triggers a rise in site traffic, you can know which marketing efforts are working.
• Traffic Sources: This is another hugely important statistic. It basically tells you how people found your website. Generally, traffic sources fit into three categories: the people who manually typed in your URL; the people who found your site through Google, Yahoo, etc…; the people who got to your site through a link on another site, often known as a referral. Another nifty thing to do is to delve deeper into the actual keywords that people who ended up on your site through search engines actually searched for.
• Top Content: This is how you can find out exactly what people are looking at on your website. Review the top 5-10 pages listed as “most visited.” Your homepage will undoubtedly be #1. But you may be surprised to see #2, #3, etc… By figuring out what people are most interested in on your website, you can then make smart decisions about which sections of your site to spend the most time keeping current.

All these statistics are fun and interesting. But they’re also important! Because by knowing who’s visiting your site, where they came from, and what they’re looking at, you have the information you need to determine what’s working, what’s not, and where your efforts should be focused going forward.

Ready to talk with us about building or marketing your author website? Contact us today for a free consultation!

I had a consultation with a client yesterday. We built her website last summer – right around the time her first title was released. Her book got enough promotion that the site traffic was pretty good right off the bat. But here we sit, a year later, and her site isn’t exactly a hopping place.

She was asking about what kind of online marketing we can do to ramp up traffic again. But I had other ideas…

Her site was built around the book. Its domain name is the book title. The graphics on the site are straight off the book cover. When someone first arrives on the site, they get to read about the book and why they should buy it.

But the book is now a year old. It’s still a great book that people could – and should – read, but it’s not new enough to drive traffic to the site any more. We can’t exactly approach bloggers and ask them to review a year-old book. Or create a buzz with viral YouTube videos.

So here’s what I advised the client: Yes, we should do some marketing of the site online. But first, we need to make it a destination site again. And to do that, it needs to transition from a book site to an author site.

Luckily, this author is already working on her second book. And it’s similar in genre to her first. So it shouldn’t be too much of a stretch to create an author website that’s of special interest to people who like her particular topic and particular style of writing.

We’re not starting from scratch. Much of the site will remain the same. We’ll design a new header with her picture and her name instead of the book cover and book name. We’ll restructure the homepage to focus on her personality, her blog, interacting with her, etc… We’ll also add new pages on the site to feature her future writings and the like. The first book will still be featured, it just won’t be the focus of the site.

Once these changes are done, then we can start marketing the site again. We’ll do some social networking. We’ll really plug the blog and try to use it to optimize the site for search engines. We’ll also reach out to reading groups, bloggers, etc … who might be interested in profiling her. And the traffic should pick back up again.

All this will pay off. When her second book gets released, we’ll have lots of eyes looking right at her website. And they’ll be ready to buy. That’s one of the benefits of an author website. Whether you’re plugging your next book, your speaking services, you consulting business … a website that focuses on you – instead of one particular title – is timeless.

There are lots of companies that say they can market your book online. And maybe they can. But what they fail to tell you is that there’s not one standard formula that works for all authors. Marketing a teen horror novel is very, very different from trying to sell copies of a self-help book about finding your soul mate. Very different audiences.

I could spend hours writing about how reaching tweens and teens requires more social networking, while reaching 60-somethings is more effectively done through search engines, but I won’t bother. Instead, the purpose of this post is to talk about the specific differences between marketing fiction books and non-fiction books.

These two categories of books are completely separate beasts. Let’s start with why people read them. Someone generally reads a non-fiction book to boost their knowledge on something. To learn more on a subject. That same person would probably read a novel because they find it relaxing. Or entertaining. Or they like the rush. Or the humor. You get the drift.

Here’s the point: What prompts someone to buy a fiction book is completely different from what prompts someone to buy a non-fiction book. Let’s start with those motivations and see how that brings us back to the marketing side of things.

What they Have in Common
There’s one thing that works for every type of book. It’s every author’s dream. It’s “buzz” or word of mouth. Your friends are all talking about this book. It’s the topic of conversation at the water cooler. So you have to buy it. It could be a biography or a fantasy. Doesn’t matter. If it’s popular, you need to read it to stay in the loop.

But tell the truth — what are the odds that your book will become cooler talk? If it does, then great! But if it doesn’t, you need to find other ways to reach potential readers. And that’s where marketing comes in.

Promoting a Non-Fiction Book
In some ways, it’s actually a lot easier to do the marketing for a non-fiction book. That’s because there are a wealth of potential readers out there who are looking for information on your particular subject at any given moment. They’re surfing the web, Googling terms, finding websites that cover the subject matter.

All you have to do is get your book in their face just as they’re doing the looking! True, that’s easier said than done. But a good place to start is with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or Google Adwords. It also can involve reaching out to websites that cover the same subject and getting your book plugged as a resource. As a nonfiction author, people are actually looking for you … you just have to make sure they find you.

Promoting a Fiction Book
This is a little more tricky. Because chances are that your potential readers have never heard of you. Or your characters. They’re not necessarily looking for your book. Instead, you have to make sure your book finds them … and wins them over.

This is where the search engine strategy goes out the window. No one actually goes on Google and searches for “good novels.” That’s just not how people choose their reading materials. Instead, they’re likely to choose a book because it’s on this month’s book club list. Or it’s recommended on their favorite social networking site.

Yes, social networking — and really “getting yourself out there” is necessary to market a fiction book. It’s only when someone stumbles upon your book and is so enamored that they have to read it that they will actually buy your book. So contact groups or educators that you think would benefit from using your book. Recommend your book to bloggers and book club leaders. Get it out there in front of as many people as possible.

Is it more work? Yes. But the rewards are plentiful. Because unless you’re a former U.S. President writing an autobiography, or a famous journalist writing an expose about a celebrity, your non-fiction book isn’t likely to become a bestseller. But anyone can become the next Nora Roberts or J.K. Rowling. The right book and the right marketing can get you there.

Ready to talk to us about marketing your book online? Click here to take advantage of our free consultation!