This post is part of our series, 50 Ways Your Website is Not
Helping You Sell More Books

20. Surround sound

“I’m surfing the web, bopping my head to my favorite mp3s. I land on your site. Your Flash intro starts up, interrupting my song with some screechy sound effects while your animation seizes control of my browser window, stretching it to weird proportions. I flee.”

Sound effects to your website might sound cool to you, but not to readers who might be surfing in an office cubicle or next to the sleeping baby’s crib.

In general, people loathe embedded sounds, scripts that seize control, and other unexpected disruptions of the natural order of life on the web.

Posted by admin in 50 Ways Your Website is Not Helping You Sell More Books at 9:58 amcomment


Leave a Reply

Elsewhere

News on author websites, blogging, and book promotion

GoDaddy, the domain registrar we often use, has a $1.99 special right now. The trick to registering with GoDaddy is to ignore all the extra junk they try to sell you after you start the checkout process. Look for links or buttons that say “No, thanks” or “Continue with checkout.” Caveat: if you don’t have a PO Box and you don’t want your address and phone number becoming public, you might want to add private registration.

Agent Colleen Lindsay is running a great series on book promotion on her blog.

While we were on vacation last week, agent Nathan Bransford wrote a couple of great posts on author websites and how authors’ blogs influence book sales. There’s some great info in the comments, although there’s also some misinformation about technical issues. (Feel free to ask us about those!)

Text Prefs — a U.K. design firm is conducting a survey on how people like to read onscreen text. Tell them how you like it! They’ve promised to publish the findings so we can all do better at designing things people read.

100 Personal Branding Tactics Using Social Media — great overview of how to use the various social media sites to promote yourself. Password management is key here, since you could be signing up for a dozen services or more. Make a spreadsheet! (via our colleague, Jeremy Tolbert)