Author Archive

When I’m working with an author to create an effective homepage, one of the things that I always ask a writer to do is create a book teaser … something that really whets the appetite of a visitor in the few seconds that you have their attention. Then you give them links to read more about the book, read an excerpt, or … of course … buy the book.

But it’s funny: professional writers who’ve written entire books aren’t always capable of writing an effective book teaser. It’s really, in many ways, a completely different skill: writing a book vs. writing marketing copy. And more often than not, I look at the copy an author gives me for the homepage and just shake my head.

With that in mind, here’s a list of author websites we built with what I found to be some of the best, most effective book teasers out there. These are organized from shortest to longest. Read them and take some lessons!

Palm Beach Confidential
Author: Robert Mykle
Teaser: Palm Beach is like Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. You think you know what’s going on, but, I guarantee, you don’t.

Lost in Plain Sight
Author: David Gerard
Teaser: A single phone call changes Anthony’s life forever. Something about Diane’s voice is different-distant. Instinctively, he realizes that his wife is in trouble. Something has gone horribly wrong, but what?

Between Yesterday and Tomorrow
Author: Charmaine Pauls
Teaser: On a seductively beautiful seventeenth-century chateau in southern France, the elegant rooms conceal a host of secrets. When Marlien Marais arrives in picturesque Castries to claim her family estate, she slowly uncovers this web of deception that lifts the veil on her past, and changes her future forever. Shimmering with romance, intrigue, and the elegance that only the French can fashion, Charmaine Pauls’ dazzling Between Yesterday and Tomorrow creates a tale of resplendent love—with a thoroughly French twist.

invisible girl
Author: Mary Hanlon Stone
Teaser: When poor Boston girl Stephanie is abandoned by her abusive mother and taken in by Annie’s wealthy Los Angeles family, she feels anything but at home. Her dark complexion and shabby clothes stick out in the golden-hued world of blondes and extravagance. These are girls who live life in fast-forward, while Stephanie is stuck on pause. Yet when a new rival moves to town, threatening Annie’s queen-bee status, Stephanie finds herself taking sides in a battle she never even knew existed, and that feeling invisible is a wound that can only be healed by standing up for who she is.

The O Street Boys
Author: Shaun Anthony Ross
Teaser: The O Street Boys is a story of  drugs, money and murder and what one young man would do to reach the top of the drug game.  Rico Patterson is not your average young man growing up in the inner city of Washington, D.C.  He is a financial prodigy and budding entrepreneur who wants to put the dope game in a choke hold.  As long as there are drugs, there will be drug addicts.  Supply and demand, it’s the American Way.  Every drug dealer  knows there’s money to be made out there and Rico wants to be the one making it.  As  long as there are drug addicts creating a demand, there will be drug dealers out there  supplying the need.  It’s about the money.    It’s always about the money.

Blood and Silk
Author: Carol Alderhoven McKay
Teaser: The Hidden Love Story of Mary Magdalene and Jesus of Nazareth is author Carol McKay’s gift to everyone fascinated by the life of Mary of Magdala-Mary Magdalene-and her often misunderstood relationship to Jesus of Nazareth. In this beautifully crafted historical novel, the reader is guided through a time rich with art and architecture, and fraught with change and controversy. Mary’s narration introduces us to first-century Judea, when the atmosphere crackled with fear, and determination of friend or foe was often difficult, if not impossible. As much as theologians paint the story about Mary and Jesus as straightforward and even simple in nature, the author reminds us that theirs was a love weighed down and complicated by the politics of the day. The story of Mary, and then Mary and Jesus, is intricate and often as perilous as the times in which they lived. Founded on historical accuracy and an eye for a well-told story, this is a novel that will fascinate and delight.

Do you have other book teasers that you love? Share them with us!

Aren’t we all secretly authors? Some of us have already published books, others are working on books. But the majority of us are just thinking about the book that we dream of writing, be it a novel or an autobiography.

Regardless of your status, there are tons of things you can do to get your author career off the ground. Not surprisingly, I’m going to recommend that you start with an author website.

Before you even ask: yes, it’s okay to have an author website even if you haven’t published anything yet.

But what should be on that author website? And how can you use it to catapult your writing career? Here are a few ways…

1. Offer writing snippets. At some point, you will be reaching out to agents and publishers in the hopes that they will be interested in your works. Well, how will they know how good a writer you are unless they can actually read your writing? Make sure to offer articles, short stories, book excerpts, etc… on your author website so that they can get a taste of your work even before it’s published.

2. Show your personality. The publishing field is much like the music industry: it used to be all about talent, but now it’s as much about “sellability” as anything else. All of this means that it almost doesn’t matter how great a writer you are. You also have to be personable, outgoing, funny, etc… in order to make it in today’s publishing world. Make sure to include photos of yourself on the website, any audio/video of yourself, and a blog that really lets your personality shine through.

3. Build a fanbase. This is probably the most important of the three items listed here. Why? Because a publisher is far more likely to work with a writer who already has 100,000 followers than one who doesn’t have a platform. Here are some creative ways to start building that platform and watching your number of followers climb:

• Blog, blog, blog. This is the best way to drive traffic to your website and keep people coming back from more. Pick a subject to blog about and stick to it. Make your blog informative, humorous, and a must-see destination. You’ll be surprised how many people keep coming back …. and even better, “sharing” your content.
• Interact. People visiting your blog will start commenting on it. You need to comment in response. Join the conversation with your readers. They will appreciate it.
• Offer email sign-ups. Give readers a good reason to enter their email address. Maybe it’s a little trinket or something. Regardless, collect as many email addresses as you can. That will be invaluable when you talk to a publisher.
• Use social networking. It doesn’t matter if your preferred network is Facebook, Twitter, etc… Ideally, it’s all of them. But make sure you build fans/followers and keep them informed on what you’re doing. Pose questions, offer tips, etc… Whatever is working, just keep doing it. And watch those numbers continue to rise.

No one said becoming a professional author is easy. But it is doable. And hopefully these ideas will help you get started.

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

Authors invest a great deal of time and money in marketing their book. And they should. But what they often don’t do is track all of their marketing efforts to really figure out which ones are working and which ones are duds.

Some authors prefer to turn to traditional marketing techniques, like:

• Press releases
• Book signings
• Media appearances

Others are soooo 21st century and will focus all their time and efforts on:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• GoodReads
• Blogs/Podcasts

But how do you know which of these techniques will work best for you? Or which combination of the two will hit the sweet spot?

Here’s how to make sure that you’re investing in what’s working. A hat-tip to Judy Cullins of BookCoaching.com on some of these ideas.

• Keep close tabs on your investments. Start a spreadsheet and make a list of all your marketing initiatives, how much they cost, and how much time you invested in each one. Make special notes next to the ones that you’ve enjoyed doing and/or ones that led to sales. After about six months, review the list and determine which items have been worth the time and which have been worth the money. The ones that don’t qualify as either? Cross them off forever!
• Keep an open mind. Scour the web (especially message boards and groups of writers) and see what other people are doing. Don’t be afraid to steal other people’s ideas. From author websites to social networking and reaching out to bloggers, there are a million ideas out there, so don’t shy away from any of them.
• Think like your audience. Put yourself in the position of a potential reader. What kind of websites would you be perusing? Where would you be looking for your next good read? Whose opinions would you respect when it comes to books? By starting at the end game and working backwards, you’ll have a distinct advantage over other authors.

How do you determine which of your marketing efforts are working? Share your ideas with us!

When is a book not just a book? Well, today.

You see, a book used to be nothing but print on paper. But then e-books started taking off, and the traditional book became an electronic version of the same. Today, with all of the downloads and apps out there — which have numerous bells and whistles — the book industry is just starting to figure out that it needs to catch up.

According to a recent article on Wired, book publishers are trying to figure out how to make their titles more immersive in this digital world. In other words, they need to take what was once a reading experience and add audio, video and interactive components for their built-for-tablet books.

According to the Wired article, here are some examples of the initial authors and publishers venturing into this realm. Check these out … hopefully they can spark some ideas.

• Chronicle (a small publishing company) recently released an iPad app for artist Stephan Pastis’ comics series Pearls Before Swine.
• A few years ago, author Amanda Havard wasn’t able to find a publisher that could bring her book The Survivors to electronic life the way she wanted. So she and her father, L.C. Havard, a former executive for a company that developed technologies for the health insurance industry, formed a company called Chafie Press to publish her books and create digital offerings. The app version of The Survivors, the first in a series of five books, integrates audio files of the music her characters are listening to (some of it produced by Chafie), pictures of the designer clothes they’re wearing, links to the characters’ Twitter accounts (Havard mostly runs them herself) and Google Maps of the places they visit
• HarperCollins released an app for The Art of the Adventures of Tintin last year; Penguin Books also launched a much-lauded app of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.
• An immersive retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is also being released as an iPad and iPhone app on April 26.

As an author today, you have to do more than just put words on paper. When you start working on your next book, think about it as a three-dimensional experience. Think audio, video, graphics. Consider how readers can interact with the story. If you don’t keep these types of things in mind, you’ll probably fall behind the times.

Happy reading!

They say that no press is bad press. I would venture to say that book reviews are similar. The more mention your book gets throughout the web, the more likely people are to hear about it and decide to check it out for themselves. Of course, a rave review will garner far more interest than a bad review, but getting your book reviewed at all can only be a good thing.

With that in mind, here are four ways to start racking up those online book reviews…

1. Think GoodReads. Scour GoodReads to find people who regularly review or recommend books in your genre. According to a blog post on Build Book Buzz, “With more that 7.3 million members, Goodreads.com gives book lovers a chance to create virtual bookshelves (with more than 260 million books!) that others can peruse. Those members not only share what they’re reading with their personal Goodreads networks, they also review and recommend those books, or create lists that announce what they want to read next.”

2. Contact Amazon reviewers. Go to the Amazon pages of other books in your genre. See who is reviewing them. Then, compare some of those names to the list of top Amazon reviewers (which you can find here). This will allow you to identify the regular reviewers who are most respected on Amazon. Reach out to each of them, tell them about your book, and offer them a free copy of the ebook. If you’re lucky, they’ll take you up on it.

3. Think bloggers. If you’re a nonfiction author, track down bloggers who regularly write on the subject matter of your book. Reach out to them, tell them about your book (and how it would benefit their audience), and ask if they’d be willing to review it. You may also want to consider offering something to sweeten the deal, like a link to their blog from your site or an article you’d be willing to write exclusively for them. Again, this is a great way to get your book right in the face of your target readership.

4. Mind your manners. There’s a blog entry on the Infinity Publishing site about the to dos (and not to dos) when contacting a book reviewer. You can read the full list, but here are some highlights:

• Don’t ask when the review will be completed.
• Don’t tell the reviewer what you want them to say.
• Don’t be offended if they don’t like the book.
• Always send a “thank you” note

Remember, even if a book review isn’t as positive as you’d like, you can probably find a sentence or two to pull and use in your promotional material. As I said … no reviews are bad reviews.

I just read a great blog post this morning. It was by Sonia Marsh, author of the forthcoming travel memoir,  Freeways to Flip-Flops: Our Year of Living Like the Swiss Family Robinson.

Sonia’s premise is one that I have focused on in previous blogs: Building a successful author website is about providing valuable information to your readers and thinking about them more than thinking about yourself. She puts it like this:

There is a secret which writers tend to forget, especially if they are not familiar with the way social media works.
Stop focusing on yourself and your book, and your audience will grow.

Here are some of the ways that both Sonia and I think you can do this…

Step 1. Bring all of your work together under one umbrella. I don’t care if you’ve written two fiction books, two nonfiction books and a wealth of poetry. Find some common factor that carries through all of your work and use it to build a brand. In Sonia’s case, the theme was “gutsy living.” Figure out what yours is.

Step 2. Develop a tagline. I tell all of my authors to have some kind of tagline under their name at the top of the website. Otherwise, how is someone going to know what they will be getting from “JaneSmith.com” or “JohnJones.com.” Once you have the branding figured out, find a way to briefly, succinctly, and creatively express it in a tagline. Sonia translated her “gutsy living” theme into the tagline, “Life is too short to play it safe.”

Step 3: Carry your theme into other works. Make sure that all of your online efforts fit under this same umbrella. Blog about the topic that ties together your work. Comment on other authors’ blog posts or articles on the topic. Use social networking tools to build a following among people interested in that subject matter. Remember, you’re building a brand here. As Sonia puts it, “You wouldn’t shop at Target for a car, so when a reader visits a travel blog, they expect to get information related to travel.”

Step 4: Interact and inform. Now that you have a “brand,” it’s important to get people interested in it and willing to come back for more. Remember, your readers are more important than you are. Provide them with information, education, etc… relevant to the subject matter. Ask them questions, and respond to their questions.  If you give more than you get, you’ll be rewarded for it.

Sonia wraps her post up wonderfully, so I will simply quote her here:

The more you connect and help others, the more people will subscribe to your blog or website, and you will gradually build an authentic platform with loyal followers. It won’t happen overnight, but once people realize that you care about them, and are willing to share helpful information, all the pieces suddenly fit together. That’s when the magic happens, and you know you’ve accomplished something more than simply being an author who wants to sell her book.

Authors tend to spend a great deal of time designing and perfecting their homepage. They treat it just like a book cover, as authors often assume that this is the page that people see first, and it’s the one that will determine whether someone decides to stay or go. Well, that’s only partially true…

You see, a website is not like a book. It’s not linear. People don’t start at page one and then peruse through. In fact, it’s safe to assume that a chunk of people visiting your website will never see your homepage.

Here’s why: The majority of people who visit your website probably don’t just type in your domain name. Instead, they go to Google and search for your name or one of your book titles. The page that shows up on search results is often not your homepage; it’s the page on which that search term appears most frequently. If the search term was your name, someone is likely to wind up on your bio page. If the search term is your book title, then they may enter your site through your book page. It’s how much you impress them on those entry pages that will determine whether someone will stay, give you their email address, buy a book, etc…

So what does this mean? It means that you have to make a good first impression just about everywhere on the website. Here are some creative ways to do that:

• Have the most important (and impressive) information appear site-wide. For example, if you have a testimonial from a NY Times book reviewer saying that your book is the best one he ever read (don’t we wish!), that should be either in the header or in a sidebar that appears on every page.
• Have each page serve a different purpose. If the goal of your book page is to sell your book, have everything someone would need to know about WHY and HOW to purchase your book right there on the book page. The goal of your author page may be to get people to give you their email address or become a twitter follower. Make sure to promote all those things on the author page.
• Include links to buy your book everywhere! I can’t stress this enough. You never know how someone is going to find your site, or which page will be the first one they visit. You don’t want to make people click around if they like what they see — wherever they arrive. Make it easy to buy your book with one click on every page of the website.

Lastly, I recommend that everyone set up a free Google Analytics account and review their site traffic data regularly. It’s only by knowing which pages on your site are visited the most that you can tweak your content and ensure that each page gets the attention it deserves.

I’ve said it many times before: it’s waaaaayyyy easier to market a nonfiction book than it is fiction. The reasons are numerous:

1. People are searching for books on specific topics. They find those books. No one is searching for a good novel, so a fiction book has to find them.

2. Nonfiction writers have knowledge in a specific field that the average guy doesn’t have. As a result, he or she can blog about the topic and have a ready-made audience of people wanting more information on the subject.

3. Nonfiction writers have a wealth of organizations, groups, websites, etc… to reach out to about promoting their book. It’s easy to explain why such a book would be valuable to people already interested in the subject matter.

But marketing a fiction book? That’s a whole lot more difficult. Thankfully, there are people out there who have come up with some great ideas for doing so. Here are highlights from a post I read today titled 7 killer book marketing tips for fiction on Build Book Buzz … and some comments in parentheses.

1. Support your book with a good website designed by a professional. (Hint: Smart Author Sites )

2. Use your content to identify promotion allies. (A great example is Camille Noe Pagán’s novel, The Art of Forgetting, which tells the story of what happens to a friendship when one of the friends suffers a traumatic brain injury. Pagán partnered with the Bob Woodruff Foundation.)

3. Think beyond book reviews. (Get the press to talk about your book for as long as it’s available for purchase.)

4. Use the nonfiction nuggets in your manuscript to create newsworthy material for media outlets. (Think about products, locations, services or brand names in your novel. Can you use any of those to find people with a personal interest in featuring your book?)

5. Take advantage of holidays, special occasions, annual events, and seasonal stories. (There’s a holiday for just about everything. Hitch your book to one of them and use it to get into the news.)

6. Leverage what you uncovered while writing your book. (Did you learn about a period in history or a specific region? Use this knowledge as a springboard for publicity.)

7. Get social. (Pick your favorite social media outlet — Facebook, Twitter, etc… — and master it.)

Hopefully, some of these techniques will help you turn your new novel into the next hot topic at the water cooler!

Talk about a chicken-and-egg situation. You have to design and build a website. You also have to get traffic there. Which should you do first? Which is more important?

Well, they’re equally important. And obviously building the site should come first. But here’s the catch: if you don’t build it the right way, all the traffic in the world won’t mean a thing. In other words, what good is having a website if the people who visit it don’t do what you want them to do?

Whether your goal as an author is to sell books, build a mailing list, or turn yourself into a superstar in your field, here are some tips I’ve collected on how to build your site right the first time around.

1. Talk to one audience. Who are you trying to reach? Is it readers? Prospective clients? Agents? Don’t spread yourself too thin trying to be too many things to too many people.

2. Track conversions. What’s your goal? Is it books sold? Sign-ups? Track how many people are doing each of these, and use Google Analytics to determine exactly how those people are getting to your site and what they’re doing while they’re there.

3. “Sell” what you want to sell. Authors have to wear many hats today. Being a marketer of themselves and their books is just one of them. Don’t be afraid to talk up your book and explain to your readers how their lives would change from reading it or how it’s the best book in its genre today. If you want people to sign up for your email list, give them incentives to do it. Be a salesperson and don’t be afraid of doing so.

4. Prioritize content over design. What would make you decide to take the plunge and buy a book? Would it be the cool graphics on the author website? Or would it be the compelling description of the book, the tantalizing testimonials, or the quote from the great review that the book got? Sometimes, authors get too caught up in a flashy design and forget what’s most important to visitors: information.

5. Build relationships. Don’t treat your website like a brick-and-mortar store. This isn’t a business you’ve created. It’s your author persona. When people join your mailing list or decide to read your book, they’re committing to you. Return the favor by writing personal thank yous to your readers, offering to answer their questions, and taking a genuine interest in how they enjoyed your books and services.

6. Be a kick-ass copywriter (or hire one). As I touched on before, words are very powerful. The websites that get the most sales are ones that literally go out, grab a potential reader, and don’t let go. If you can write that way, then great!  If not, consider hiring someone to write some of your sales copy … or at least getting some feedback from other professionals on your efforts.

Remember, if you don’t do it right the first time around, those visitors may never come back again.

Ready to get started on an author website? Contact us today for a free consultation!

I’ve written posts before about the options for building online shopping carts for authors. But there’s some news this week that gives authors yet another way to sell their books online.

Lulu.com, one of the industry leaders in the self-publishing and selling of e-books, launched a new e-commerce platform this week. Their site underwent many upgrades that reportedly can improve the self-publishing experience.

But there’s one little tidbit that was part of this announcement which intrigued me the most:

The new platform creates an entirely new infrastructure for Lulu.com to build upon, which greatly increases the speed at which the company can release new features and updates in the future to better equip customers with the tools they need, when they need them.  One example being Lulu.com’s soon to be available ecommerce APIs (Application Programmer Interfaces), which enable businesses and publishers to build Lulu.com and Elastic Path’s ecommerce tools into their own branded websites – absolutely free.

If I am understanding this correctly, this means that authors will now be able to embed the Lulu shopping cart into their own website at no cost. They can sell one or more of their books through their site, allow people to purchase multiple copies of each one … and these readers would never leave the author’s site.

For authors who publish through Lulu and only sell e-books, this is a huge boon. I know I’ll be recommending it to authors who fit the bill.

Unfortunately, that’s only a small percentage of authors … at least as of today. Remember: this shopping cart will only allow you to sell the e-book through Lulu. You can’t sell hard-copies, and you can’t let people purchase it through Amazon, B&N, etc…

That said, this may be one of those defining moments that causes even more authors to publish through Lulu. After all, self publishing and e-books are the wave of the future. This news can just help speed that process along.