The Author's Website

Robert Mening, founder of WebsiteSetup.org talks JJ Marsh through the considerations when setting up an author's website.


What are the must-haves for a writer's website?

Some writers create their website in order to achieve their ultimate goal; which is mainly reaching their target audience and get people to read their site content and maybe to have their books sold to them. While it’s easy and quickly to set up a website, it is important for writers to remember that a website represents who they are and what they have to offer.

Photo by Green Chameleon on Unsplash

The must-haves for a writer's website are:

- About/Bio Page: To have a bio and links to online social media pages. A writer needs to create a separate page with a more detailed bio and a professional author photo.

- Portfolio Page: A page of portfolio of work detailing any work a writer has made and always include links to where the writer's work can be read or purchased. Also, writers might have a separate page for books and products/services, or they might combine everything in a single page if there is only a few things.

- Blog: A blog platform is highly recommended to keep readers coming back to the writer website. It should be updated regularly with articles relating to writing experiences and journeys.

- Email newsletter: A writer needs to start collecting email subscribers to stay in touch with readers who visit their site. Whether they send it once a month or once a week, Email newsletter is always a great way to keep writers audience comping back to the website.

- Contact page: It is a vital part of a website, so writers should take a good amount of time to make it excellent! Make it as easy as possible for someone to get your contact details because visitors might be potential clients, they will more than likely want to contact a writer at some point time.


How does one keep it fresh?

The single most important thing a writer needs to have to do when creating their first unique website is posting regular content, because often updated blogs do perform well against inconsistent ones. It's a no-brainer that once a writer abandons their website, their audience would stop visiting the website and they would see a drastic decrease in terms of website traffic. That said, writers should keep their blog as fresh as a daisy by adding fresh content and updating old blog posts. To do so, consider using these tips:

- Decide on a blog posting frequency, it may be every other day or once a week. Whatever you decide, let your readers know so that they can expect when you're going to post a new content.

- Accept that there will times when you don’t have time or just won’t feel like updating your blog. Then prepare for it and take advantage of the option to schedule posts in advance.

- Always keep your eyes out for new content by visiting regularly other related author sites. What are they doing? You’d be surprised how many times you would find something relevant to your own website.

- Encourage readers to comment on your blog posts or to contact you. You'd be wondering how that will help you maintain your blog. Your readers are sometimes the best sources of new content so keep interacting with as much as possible.

- Make sure your site is up to date with your current book information and as mentioned above always include links to where your hard work can be read or purchased.

- Check your site stats, by using a tool to check your website statistics, you’ll start collecting data on your website traffic, your will see the most popular content, and how your visitors navigate or use the site. For instance, if you find out one section of your site that is popular, consider rewriting and expanding that section to offer more.

Photo by José Alejandro Cuffia on Unsplash

What sort of things should writers avoid?

- Start Fast and Expect better Results: You know your schedule and abilities better than anyone else, so don’t try posting every day. Start out by posting weekly until you get your feet wet then you can increase your posting.

- Limit your word count: If you have got something to say, write it. Readers prefer to read comprehensive content (More than 500 words). This doesn’t mean you can’t feature shorter pieces, of course you can but when the time is right, go long.

- Make grammar mistakes: If you ever want readers to take you seriously, you have to take your website seriously. So if you do grammar mistakes, correct them as soon as possible. Give your website the professional quality it deserves.

- Be negative: It’s generally unacceptable to be negative when writing your blog posts, you will develop your professional career as an author by being positive, inspirational and supportive to the community that you’re writing to.

- Avoid trying new things: It’s important to let your blog evolve over time and take risks from time to time. Whether it’s adding infographs or personal stories or guest bloggers. If you feel it can add value to your blog, do it and don't be afraid.


Any top tips for authors who have never created a website before?

A website is your most critical tool for book promotion and long-term platform development. When you create your very first website, consider doing it right. These tips listed below will help you launch your website effectively.

- Know the audience you're targeting and get ideas from other relevant authors.

- Be consistent, once you get going on, consistency is key. Try to keep you blog updated by posting at least once a week.

- Write catchy headlines and don't be shy to ask your audience to share your content on social media.

- Create good content that keeps your readers coming back over and over.

- Monetize your blog with products and services that are related and valued to your content and your readers.

- Build your email list and start sending your subscribers email about your blog.

- Build a community, start engaging on other blogs/forums in your niche, and include a link to your blog every time you post a comment.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Does that sound doable?

Creating a website was once a tricky and expensive process. Fortunately, nowadays we have website builders who come into play and have made it easier than ever to create a stunning website without any knowledge of coding. It allows anyone and everyone to create a great website under just an hour.

Website Builders have a handy feature that shows you exactly what your site will look like as you're editing it. As you edit your site in the back-end, it's a matter of drag and drop to build the ideal website, this means that anyone can create a website, even without past experience of doing so.

Thank you, Robert, for such practical advice.


For more information on which website-builder to use, read the results of Robert's research in https://websitesetup.org/website-builders/

Marketing for Authors - FBF 14 Reportage

Ich bin hier/I am here: © Alexander Heimann/Frankfurt Book Fair

A range of ideas emerged from The International Self-Publishing and Author Programme at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair on the subject of marketing.

The audience was most self-published or hybrid authors, but the information is equally relevant to trade published writers who are expected to do much of their own marketing. Discoverability is everyone’s problem.

Speakers included Porter Anderson of FutureBook, Edward Nawotka of Publishing Perspectives, Alison Baverstock of Kingston University, Orna Ross of ALLi, David Taylor and Robin Cutler of Ingram UK, Joanna Penn of The Creative Penn, Hayley Radford of Authoright, Jonas Lennermo of Publit, Julia Koblentz of Nook, Dr Florian Geuppert of Books On Demand, Camille Mofidi of Kobo Writing Life, Matthias Matting of Der SelfPublisher Bibel, Meire Dias of Bookcase Literary Agency, Victoria Sutherland of Foreword magazine, author Lynn Isenberg, author Kit Berry and author Dmitry Gluhkovsky.

The number one point made countless times is that authors who don’t market, don’t sell. Whether you do it yourself or hire someone to do it for you, marketing is a vital part of connecting to your readership.

The very word ‘marketing’ makes many authors shudder. But it doesn’t have to be a chore. One excellent tip is to find the marketing channels that suit your personality type. If you enjoying blogging or prefer Twitter to personal appearances or relish getting to grips with metadata - choose what works for you and make the most of it.

“Getting attention is different to getting approval” - Alison Baverstock

Paulo Coelho. © Bernd Hartung/Frankfurt Book Fair

Social media: build relationships and be authentic. Be generous - with useful information, with support, with introductions and connections. Posting only your own stuff makes you appear amateur. Many organisations want to scoop up interesting, quirky, relevant tweets, which will drive traffic in your direction.

Platform: This should be about more than selling books. Blogs where the last post was February 2013 do you no favours. Change the title of a blog post and repost. Use search engine terms and keywords. Host interviews, create a community. If you don’t have a blog, write posts for other people. Kobo Writing Life has a blog which hosts authors with something to say.

Brand partnerships: Lynn Isenberg wrote a book called The Funeral Planner - chick-lit for entrepreneurs - and formed alliances with funeral parlours and obituary writers. For an author friend who’d written Dogphoria, a non-fiction book of pictures and quotes about the joy of dogs, she engineered a cooperation between PETCO (dog adoption charity), gaining attention and celebrity tweets.

To free or not to free. Opinions differed on whether making your work free is a worthwhile strategy. Only a portion, or the first of a series, was oft-heard advice. But Dmitry Glukhovsky put his entire book up on his site, gathered an eager readership and community who contributed to a gallery. He has now sold the rights for a video game. Wattpad and Widbook are two platforms where writers can gain an audience by sharing part or all of their work.

Reviews. Tailor your approach, remain professional and make it easy for people to say yes. Have a strapline, a brief blurb and a longer description all on a one page with cover, puff quotes and all relevant links.

Grunt work. It’s essential to get the metadata right, include keywords and SEO factors. In digital publishing, you can change the title, add a subtitle, get frequently searched terms in your description. Learn what the pricing sweet spots are and which countries/platforms respond better to higher/lower pricing.

Collaborate. Work with other authors. Find a group of writers in the same genre and put out a boxset or offer to appear as experts at a literary festival. Hold an event such as a launch party or pop-up bookshop. Build alliances with bookshops and cross promote each others’ work.

Books in Motion. © Bernd Hartung/Frankfurt Book Fair

Moment marketing. Especially useful for non-fiction, but can be applied to fiction. Look for parallels in the news. Set up Google alerts for certain keywords and connect the stories to your book. Become the go-to person on that theme.

Print. Some authors feel print is only worthwhile once the ebook is flying. Others emphasise the importance of having copies to sign and sell at events, as giveaway prizes. Printed material of some kind - bookmark, postcard, flyer - makes people remember and have the details to hand.

Finally, Joanna Penn, author of How To Market a Book, advises integrating marketing slots into your day.

You are a writer. Fit the marketing activity around the writing, not the other way around.

In this issue of Words with JAM, you’ll find a second FBF 14 summary:

Global Trends in Self Publishing

Plus if you’re thinking of attending the fair next year, check out this post:

Five Tips on how authors can get the most out of a book fair.

Creating an Author Platform

by Catriona Troth

Having attended November’s Byte the Book event, with its head to head between Polly Courtney and Richard Charkin, CEO of Bloomsbury, I was thrilled to be asked to take part in the first Byte the Book of 2014.

Byte the Book is the brainchild of Justine Solomons. The organisation aims to bring together authors, editors and others in the publishing industry, give them a networking opportunity and also educate them about the impact on the industry of technological.  Their live events at The Club at The Ivy in central London attract audiences of around a hundred and are followed on Twitter by many more.

The subject for January was Creating an Author Platform in a Digital Age.  As someone who is pretty much on the nursery slopes when it come of creating a platform, I might have questioned what I had to offer, but Justine was keen for me to talk about Triskele Books and how our approach, as a collective, differed from that of a lone author.

My fellow panellists on this occasion were:

Alex Heminsley [@Hemmo], freelance journalist and author of Running Like a Girl - “a practical exhortation to ‘ordinary women’ to lace up their trainers, and see what they are capable of.”

Jeff Norton [@thejeffnorton], author of the high-tech thriller series Metawars for young readers; through his production company, Awesome, he is also currently producing a pre-school television show, developing his first feature film, and co-writing books with other talented authors.    

Byte the Book has a close relationship with Twitter.  The events are not only promoted via Twitter, but those attending are encouraged to tweet live from the event, with their tweets appearing on an interactive board behind the participants.  So it was only natural that Justine should begin by asking each of us about our relationship with Twitter. 

Alex Heminsley was an ‘early adopter’.  “I joined Twitter when it was still rather a silly place,” she said. (“It still is, isn’t it?” said Justine.) In some ways, it could be said that Running Like a Girl grew out of Twitter.  A lot of her tweets were about running - “When you’re running, you can still have spare energy in your thumbs,” - and she began to find people tweeting to ask her to recommend a book about running.  There were plenty of them, but they tended to focus on technical things like training plans.  That wasn’t what she was looking for and she sensed that it wasn’t what her followers were looking for either.  So classic answer to the problem - if there is a book you’d like to read that doesn’t exist yet, write it yourself!

My relationship with Twitter was much more recent. I only joined about eighteen months ago.

“I was pretty sceptical at first, but I have become a massive enthusiast. I made a conscious decision from the start that I wasn’t going to chase the maximum number of followers.  I couldn’t see the point of having ten thousand followers if only ten of them were actually interested in reading what I had to say.  So well before my book was published, I focused on interacting with people who were interested in the same issues as I was, following them and posting stuff I thought they would engage with. I guess you could say my aim was to find what author and self-publishing guru Dan Holloway calls ‘A Thousand True Fans.’ I am still a long way from achieving that, but the goal is there.”

Jeff Norton’s position is different again.  Although he is an enthusiast for Twitter, his audience is not to be found online. (“Either they’re not allowed on social media, or they don’t use it because, now mum and dad are doing it, it’s no longer cool.”) On the other hand, he has a captive audience.

“My readers are legally obliged to be in school six hours a day, five days a week - I always know where to find them. And you know what?  They love to be in the same room with you and be able to look you in the eye.”

All three of us agreed that the most important thing - however you achieved it - was to make a real connection with readers.

As Alex said, “If you went to a party and someone came right up to you and just kept saying ‘my book’s out on Thursday; my book’s out on Thursday,’ you’d pretty soon start to avoid them.”

Justine asked Jeff about his background in branding, and how an author might define their own brand.

“It’s much harder to create a brand for an author than it is for a product.  You take a glass of water; you give it a name - that’s Febreeze.  It can be painful for an author to reduce themselves to three words, but it can be useful.  But more important than that is to be compelling and to be consistent.”

I was then asked to explain the difference between being self-published and working in a collective.

“First of all, Triskele is not a company. (We took one look at the fact that we lived in three European countries, one of which was not even in the EU, and decided not to go there.) We each pay for the publication of our own books and receive our own royalties.  So what do we do together?

“We hold each other to a high standard.  We co-edit one another’s books, as well as using the same thoughtful and meticulous proofreader, Perry Iles. We share a wonderful designer - JD Smith - who creates all our covers and does our interior formatting.  But most importantly, we share the marketing.

“We have a shared website and blog, and we take turns to write for it and for other guest blogs. That way we are not constantly trying to come up with something new to say but can pass the buck to the next in line.  

“As Jeff said, it can be pretty tough to try and define yourself as a brand and then keep talking (however politely and obliquely) about how good you are.  But to talk about how great everyone else in the group is, and at the same time to share our experiences with other writers - that’s something else again.”

At this point we arrived at the coolest part of the evening for me. In my enthusiasm, I had been talking faster and faster and the microphone had been drifting away from my mouth, so the back rows were having trouble hearing me. But Jeff Norton could hear me all right.  He took the microphone from me and said, “These guys sound like the Wu Tang Clan of indie publishing.”

Now, I am old and boring and I have to admit I had to look this up - but I understood enough to know this was a damn fine compliment.  (For those of you who share my ignorance, the Wu Tang Clan are a New York hip-hop group known for launching the careers of affiliated artists collectively known as the Wu-Tang Killa Bees.)

From Alex’s early background in publishing, she was asked what she thought was the most effective way of promoting oneself to sell books.

“Well, the first thing is, you can promote yourself as much as you like, but as a writer you need a text people will engage with. But then you need to think about how you project yourself.  If a reader meets you first via social median they are going to want to know: is the person who’s written this going to bug me the whole time I'm reading it?

“And you don’t always have to be super-professional and glossy.  Take a book trailer, for example - there is something the Velcro tackiness of a video shot on an iPhone that is very appealing.”

Did I think authors were better placed to promote themselves than publishers?

“I don’t know if they are better placed, but whether they are trade published or indie, it is a pretty sure bet these days that they are going to have to do it.  The trick is to find a balance between what is effective and what you are comfortable with, and then go for it.”

Jeff’s view is that your book is always going to be more important to you than it is to a publisher. “They get their pay check at the end of the month whether your book sells or not.

And Alex’s final advice to authors to help them build a profile?

“Show authenticity and integrity, and create a generous space around you.”

Which sounds like good advice for anyone - in real life as much as on social media.

The next Byte the Book is on Pricing: What are the most effective publishing pricing models? It’s on Monday 10th February, starting at 18:30 at The Club at the Ivy.  Tickets are FREE to Byte the Book members, but must be reserved.  Non-members pay £15.  You can book here.

Future events can be viewed here.

If you can't make it to an event, you can get live updates during the evening - or catch up with it later - by following the hashtag #bytethebook on Twitter. 

Catriona Troth is a member of Triskele Books Author Collective and the author of two novels - Gift of the Raven and Ghost Town. The story of Triskele’s adventure in independent publishing can be read in The Triskele Trail - a collection of shared wisdom and foolishness.

www.catrionatroth.com

https://www.facebook.com/catrionatrothbooks

@L1bCat