SF authors on social networking
This week’s Mind Meld at SF Signal asks: “How has blogging and the emergence of social networking changed the face of publishing? How has it affected you personally?” Fourteen authors offer fourteen answers.
August 19, 2009
August 5, 2009
How Twitter works and why people in publishing should consider using it
How Twitter works and why people in publishing should consider using it — another great post from The Book Publicity Blog.
July 23, 2009
Covers, marketing, authenticity
When Justine sent me the US cover for her upcoming book, Liar, she added, “I hate it.”
“Why?” I wrote back. “Faces are visually arresting! The black and white photo is striking!”
“The protagonist isn’t white,” she replied.
Thud.
“OH,” I said.
Book covers that portray non-white protagonists as white are nothing new. But because the black protagonist is a compulsive liar, this cover actually changes the way people are reading the story. Justine writes, “One of the most upsetting impacts of the cover is that it’s led readers to question everything about Micah: If she doesn’t look anything like the girl on the cover maybe nothing she says is true.”
Bloomsbury’s publishing director comes back with ‘we meant to do that’:
“I do think it’s going to raise awareness of race in teen literature to new levels,” said Cecka. “Clearly, our striving for ambiguity with this cover, and for it to be interpreted as a ‘lie’ itself didn’t work for everyone. But again, if this jacket proves a catalyst for a bigger discussion about how the industry is dealing with its books on race, that’s a very large good to come of this current whirlwind.”
Whether this strategy works for them remains to be seen. It is getting a lot of attention. Those sites are doing a great job of discussing the race issues, so I won’t go into that here. However, the Liar cover is also a reminder that marketing is not just about selling things. It’s also about setting expectations for the buyer.
Think about Apple’s iPhones. You’ve seen the ads: the disembodied hand flicking through the music library, turning the screen to see a video, answering a phone call. Would the phone have sold as well if buyers had found that it didn’t really work like that once they got their hands on it? I don’t think so. Apple’s ads were great not just because they showed something cool, but because the product they were selling actually was cool.
Book covers are not the only things that set expectations. Websites do, too. One of my favorite science fiction authors, who writes gritty, realistic stories full of psychologically damaged characters, has an inexplicably flowery website. Take her work or leave it, but those books are not all hearts and butterflies! We’ve argued with authors over the artwork they wanted to use on their websites, if they wanted to use it because it was pretty, or they liked it, or their family friend created it. If the art doesn’t also give the reader a reasonably accurate impression of the kind of book they’re selling her, then none of those reasons is good enough to justify its use.
To create a happy reader, you have to get her attention, make her want to buy the book, and fulfill (or exceed) her expectations. Marketing covers the first two; the rest is between the pages. A book’s marketing needs to be in sync with its contents, and an author’s brand needs to reflect the style of her work.
Authors might not have control over their covers, but they do have control over their websites. That might be cold comfort when a reader questions a protagonist because of the cover art, but at least in the online realm, it’s also empowering. This is the part you can fix. This is where you can get it right.
(Update, August 6: They fixed it.)
January 26, 2009
“Website visits translate directly to the number of books bought.”
We’re fascinated by Publishing Trends’ report on author websites (found via PersonaNonData). A group called Codex has done a huge survey on the impact of author websites, and we now have some numbers to back up our theories about what works and what doesn’t.
For starters, having a website in the first place? Not an option:
Website visits translate directly to the number of books bought. Book shoppers who had visited an author website in the past week bought 38% more books, from a wider range of retailers, than those who had not visited an author site. “Is putting up a website going to make a book a bestseller? No,” says Chin. “Is the website going to help the author build an audience? I believe it can. What you don’t want is for someone to hear about your book, search for it with Google, and find nothing. That’s a potential lost sale.”
Yes! I would take it one step further: you don’t want that reader to find your Wikipedia article, your publisher’s catalog, and an interview you did with a small-town weekly paper before they find your site on Google. Search engine optimization is a huge factor in our sites’ construction. We want you to be the authority on your work, and we want readers to go straight to you for information.
“Websites have become even more important as people are not in stores discovering books,” Fitzgerald says. “We need to get them jazzed about a title and their favorite author and give them reason not just to buy the book, but also to have a relationship with the author and his or her work so they become evangelists for them with fellow readers.”
In short, getting people to the website is not enough. You have to keep them coming back. How? Build a site that lets your readers participate:
Codex found that giving audiences the ability to engage with other readers is the factor that correlates most with high site engagement.
Exactly. People do not want to engage with the site itself; after all, that’s just technology. They want to engage with other people — other readers and especially the author. This is one reason we think Flash movies and games are far less useful than blogs (with comment threads where readers can talk to you and to each other), forums, mailing lists, and wikis.
In fact, that’s the heart of the Web 2.0 revolution: web visitors want to contribute to the conversation.
We’ll post more about that in a bit. Back to the study, which gives us some hard numbers on exactly what readers want to see on your sites:
Codex found that the main thing respondents want on fiction authors’ sites is exclusive, unpublished writing, with 43% saying they’d return for it regularly. “Exclusive content appears to be a missed opportunity on almost all sites,” says Hildick-Smith, and women find it especially appealing. Visitors will also return to authors’ sites regularly for schedules of author tours, book signings, and area appearances (36%); lists of the author’s favorite writers and recommended books; “explainers,” or inside information about the book (36%, with men finding these especially appealing); downloadable extras like icons and sample chapters (33%); and weekly e-mail news bulletins with updates on tours, reviews, and books in progress (33%).
Notice that a lot of that stuff is timely information. Updating the site regularly is absolutely essential. That’s the primary reason we build most of our sites in WordPress rather than static HTML pages. Rather than asking you to learn HTML or buy complicated software, we give you a relatively simple interface that gives you complete control over the information on your site. Yes, we just like the software, and yes, since WordPress is built for blogging, it’s a logical choice for a site that includes a blog. However, we’ve used it on sites that didn’t include blogs, merely because it gave the site owner so much freedom.
Talk to your readers. Give them information they won’t find elsewhere. Give them a way to talk to you and to each other. Keep them up to date about what’s going on with your career.
That’s it. Easy, right?
