We are so excited to announce that Linda Warren (one of our first clients) is a finalist in Romance Writers of America’s Rita contest. Her September 2008 release Texas Heir (a Harlequin American Romance) finaled in the Contemporary Series Romance category with eight others. Congrats, Linda!
Posted by sarah in Client News at 9:03 am • comment
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.
The Writing Excuses podcast tackles author websites — 15 minutes of smart authors talking about what their colleagues do wrong (and occasionally right), what not-yet-published authors need to do, etc. (Here’s a transcript, if you prefer.)
In my spare time (!), I’ve been reworking a very simple content management system that was abandoned by its creators several years ago. If you’re a minimalist, or your host doesn’t let you have a database, check out Whisper.
Posted by steph in Announcements at 1:33 am • comment
Free Tools to Create an Online Survey — need to survey your readers? These services let you put up surveys quickly and easily. Watch out for the limitations on the free versions; some of them make you upgrade to paid if you want (for example) more than 10 questions or 100 responses.
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?
Posted by steph in How To, Publishing Industry at 3:42 pm • comment
Therese Walsh offers advice on choosing a web designer at Writer Unboxed — all of it very good.
How to Promote Your Book If You’re Introverted, Socially Inept… (via Smart Bitches)
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.
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