July 28, 2010
Someone once said that the difference between traditional marketing and Web marketing is the difference between getting attention and giving attention. I couldn’t agree more
Let’s say I want to get your attention and you’re on the other side of a busy road. I will probably wave and shout. Let’s say I get your attention and you cross the road and come to me. What should I do now? Should I keep waving and shouting in your face? It probably wouldn’t be a good idea.
A lot of websites are waving and shouting in their customers’ faces. Big fancy intro pages, flash animations, and pop ups are all attention-getting strategies, when what’s needed is to give some attention. Why? Because the customer has made a deliberate decision to visit us; we’ve already got their attention. Now they want to do something. They want some questions answered and they don’t want anything to get in the way.
If you use attention-getting strategies on your website, you stand a strong chance of really annoying your customers.
– Gerry McGovern, Killer Web Content
If you’re an author, people are undoubtedly visiting your site because someone told them they might like your books and they want to learn more about you. How are you welcoming them? Are you giving them what they’re looking for?
Posted by Stephanie Leary in How To, Marketing at 2:56 pm •
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December 15, 2009
Author Justine Musk is writing a great series called “building your author platform even if you’re not published yet.” Part one explains why you should, and part two talks about what to do after you’ve created your blog.
Posted by Stephanie Leary in How To, Marketing, Social Media at 5:09 pm •
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October 15, 2009
Harlequin’s Malle Vallik always has excellent advice on social media. Her column today at Romancing the Blog is excellent:
A great social media tool is the comment section of your blog or someone’s blog that you’ve identified as worth following. This someone else has already started the conversation and they are hoping, wanting a new friend to join in. Good commenting helps establish your online presence and builds your author brand.
And then she offers five ways to comment effectively. If you already live comfortably online, these things might seem obvious. If the blogosphere is foreign to you, this is a great explanation of comment culture.
Posted by Stephanie Leary in How To, Marketing, Social Media at 10:18 am •
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August 19, 2009
As the economy gets worse and publishing deals fall through, we’ve seen a lot of authors turn to serial fiction projects. We’re quite avid fans of a few! However, it seems that most authors don’t know how to properly manage a web serial. Because they’re doing things the hard way, they introduce little glitches into the process — and spend more time than they need to on technical issues. We see the same problems over and over:
Formatting. Your manuscript is probably in Word. When you try to save as HTML or paste the chapter into a web editor, everything gets screwed up: your curly quotes turn into weird symbols, your em dashes turn into square boxes, and your line breaks sometimes disappear altogether.
Scheduling. You want to publish your new chapters at roughly the same time every week (or month, etc.). Yet, you have a life (such as it is). You can’t guarantee that you’ll be at home in front of the computer at 9 a.m. on a Monday two months from now.
Consistency. You’ve built a lovely design for your serial, but every time you copy a new chapter into your template, something goes wrong — a fiddly bit in the footer disappears, or a background image at the top gets cut off for no apparent reason.
Linking. Every new chapter has to be added to the table of contents, and you really ought to have ‘next’ and ‘previous’ links on each chapter for easier navigation… but sometimes you forget to add links to the latest installment in all the right places.
Announcing. Not only do you have to be there at 9 a.m. on Monday to publish your new chapter, but you have to alert people that it’s up. Do you keep a mailing list so you can send emails? Do you build an RSS feed? Do you use Twitter, Facebook, or LiveJournal?
Managing all this with flat HTML files, formatted and linked by hand, is an enormous pain. There is a better way! You can automate all these aspects of publishing a serial. Set it all up in advance, and all you have to worry about is producing those installments. (more…)
Posted by Stephanie Leary in How To at 11:35 pm •
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July 1, 2009
We adore The Book Publicity Blog. Check out all the great posts:
Amazingly, we don’t disagree with anything so far. Follow this blog! And contact us when you need help setting yourself up on the web.
Posted by Stephanie Leary in How To, Marketing at 2:59 pm •
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June 26, 2009
Jia Gayles, Promotions/Public Relations Director of The Knight Agency, has some fantastic advice regarding online promotion for authors, covering virtual book tours, using online event sites to find local groups, starting a website on the cheap, and using Facebook and Twitter effectively.
Posted by Stephanie Leary in How To, Marketing at 1:39 pm •
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March 30, 2009
Today I stumbled across a marketing tip: use LibraryThing to find reviewers for your book. I’m ambivalent about the idea. On the one hand: that’s clever. On the other hand: that’s essentially spamming the LibraryThing user. What do you think?
Posted by Stephanie Leary in How To, Marketing at 5:21 pm •
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March 27, 2009
March 25, 2009
Building a Better Author — Lori Devoti has a great list of helpful things authors can do for their readers, including tips for improving websites and contacting readers when a new release comes out.
Posted by Stephanie Leary in How To, Marketing at 1:15 pm •
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March 22, 2009
Writer Unboxed has a lovely post from author J.A. Konrath on self-promotion. Of course, I was most interested in what he has to say about websites, and I wasn’t disappointed:
2. Provide Internet Content. People are looking for two things on the net; information and entertainment. They aren’t looking for advertising.
If your website or blog is just a big commercial, it will be ignored.
But if it offers, for free, compelling and constantly updated content, surfers will find you. Even more importantly, they’ll find you through the content, not through your name. Anyone who already knows you can find you on the world wide web–that’s not a victory. Your goal is to get people to find you when they’re looking for something else.
Yes! This sounds tricky, but it’s not too hard. Consider the first item on Konrath’s list, writing short stories. What do you do after the story comes out? If your contract allows, post it online! Now, when people are looking for an urban fantasy story featuring trolls or this year’s Hugo-nominated stories, or what have you, they find you.
Konrath himself accomplishes this goal by blogging extensively about self-promotion, and writers of all sorts find his site that way.
Post your short fiction. Blog about something. Give people something to find, and something they can link to.
3. Link. The more people you can trade links with, the higher your Google ranking, the easier it is for folks to discover you.
This is what made Google better than other search engines: instead of just indexing each site independently, it views them in the context of all other websites. Your content is evaluated not just on its own merits, but its credibility with other sites is taken into consideration. How? In the way those sites link to yours.
The simplest way to get linky is to create a blogroll. However, Google loves sites that are timely and frequently updated. Even better than the blogroll link is the link within a blog post (like the ones that kicked off this entry).
Konrath has summed up the two-step process of establishing a successful website: post things that people want to link to, and link to other interesting sites.
Posted by Stephanie Leary in How To, Marketing at 2:59 pm •
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