Your Author Website and Building Your Name as a Brand
I hope to start a series of ebook and author marketing type posts because I think there is a need for it, this will be the first.
When I was a kid and went into a bookstore or library I had a ritual: first I would go to the science fiction section and check for any new books by Arthur C. Clarke, next I would check for any new Asimov books that looked interesting, and I would most certainly check in the fiction section for anything new by Alistair MacLean. Do you see the common denominator here? After I read the first book by one of these authors I started looking for more books by the author name: not by title, not by cover art, but by the name of the author.
So once somebody reads that first book written by you, the author, they are going to look for more books by you. Moreover, others who have read your book are most likely to recommend it by title and author.
Now if somebody wants to search for information about you, the author, are they going to be able to find it? The answer should be "yes" and this is exactly why you need an official author's website. Your Pen Name is Your Brand.
You Are Not Your Book and You Are Not Your World: I see this a lot, authors who create a wonderful site about their book(s) and their fictional world building and yet I cannot even find the name of the author anywhere on the site. It should be the other way around, the site should be wrapped up in the identity of the author, and there can be a page or a section of the site devoted to the book and the world. Fans will love it, but you need to imprint your name upon them. Books come and go, 20 years from now you may well be writing something completely different so you need to get people used to looking for your name.
Look at the example of Cory Doctorow's author website. The site is about him but within the site there are subsections about each book and his other activities and writings.
Content: An author's site needs to focus on the author. It also needs to contain the following sections: Biographical information, bibliography, at least one page for each of your books (or series) with direct links to buy that book from your publisher and Amazon (if applicable, Barnes and Noble is also good as is Powells), contact information, your agent's name and contact information (if you have one). Pictures, reviews, links to your author friends are also good but optional. I highly recommend that you have a page where you can talk to your readers and that you update regularly.
The site need not be fancy and you do not need to hire a website site designer.
Recommendations:
Register your own domain: "johnsmith.com", "janesmithonline.com" you are not bound by using a Dot Com domain either, you can register a .info, .us or .name domain too. British authors should investigate registering something with a .uk extension but a .com will do for them too. It is better if you register the domain rather than letting your host do it. This way you can point the domain at any hosting account should you ever need to move your website and you retain control. I use Godaddy http://www.godaddy.com/ to register my domains they are inexpensive and fairly easy to use.
Hosting: Like domains, web hosting has gotten very inexpensive. I strongly recommend you do get a real hosting account and stay away from free hosting accounts. Free accounts are okay for a fan site, but you author site is really your corporate headquarters so to speak. Look at something like iPowerweb http://ipowerweb.com/ as a source for reasonable but full featured hosting.
Site Building: I do not recommend using online site builders. You want to use software that resides on your computer to build your website that way there is always a backup of the site on your harddrive.
If money is tight the Mozilla Browser Suite is free and comes with Composer included. Composer is a very competent WYSIWYG web page builder and the whole thing runs on any operating system. It is fine for a small site and/or to get you started.
There are other very good easy to use web site builders that are not too expensive:
Windows:
Namo Web Editor
Site Spinner
Abraxas CoverSite
NetObjects Fusion
Mac OS X:
Softpress Freeway
Linux:
Nvu
The strength with all the above web builders is that you do not have to learn HTML to build a website. In fact they are no harder to learn than a word processing program. Keep your site design simple and focus on content.
Most of these site builders include a built in FTP program that will let you upload your site to your hosting account. If you should need a separate FTP client you can find free ones by doing a search.
Your name is your brand. If you are in this long term, then do not just promote your book on the Internet, promote yourself. An author website is the cornerstone of all your other web promotion efforts. If you design it right it can represent you in both directories that list author sites and the book sections can represent you in the directories that only list books.
Hunt around the web for some author sites and get some ideas as to what works and what does not work.
3 Comments:
I agree totally - except on one item.
I use Yahoo! Geocities, and their site builder is great. It is easy to use, and you need know nothing whatever about computer languages and such - which is the only reason I can build a website.
The author name as the domain name is, as you noted, very important. I use C. D. Moulton - author as the site name, and Maitaman as the domain name, list a lot of the books with links both to Lulu and the page on the website, comments, and links to sites such as this, have some personal information, and there is an e-mail link on it.
I average around 2K hits per month, mostly from Amazon and the forums where the URL is listed. Listing the URL on free search engines adds to the hits.
It's obvious from a first glance that I'm no professional designer, but a few things are very important to the site, such as using as much information as possible in the first 150 words. That's what the crawlers pick up. I put something like "author of the Flight of the Maita SF series, the CD Grimes and Nick Story detective/murder mysteries, etc."
The site costs less than $10 per month, and I've got something like 100 pages on it. If it sells 3 books per month, it pays for itself.
You can look it over at www.maitaman.com
CD
It's a good site you have maitaman and you were smart to make it.
The main thing is to have that site to act as your marketing platform and to be sure to get your name as the author out there. I was not kidding when I said I've seen many sites where the author forgets to tell me their name and secondly, forget to tell me how I can buy their book. But a little clear planning about their site and how they are going to market themselves can solve that for many authors.
My word of warning still stands about online site builders, I know a lot of people that have lost their sites when Geocities or Angelfire had a little server burp. I know others that didn't loose their site but pages started to get corrupted. Hosting on Geocities in a paid hosting plan is probably alright but I still caution about the online builders. The main thing is to have backups on your HD and maybe burned to a CD.
Yo! That's a point anyone with a website should be very careful to do. Save it to disk - not so much because of a scramble or page loss, but from a legal standpoint.
Whatever you put on the web is legally publishing, and you can be held liable for content, so have a true copy you can show.
I would caution users to go to their webpage(s) and use the "Save Web Page" feature directly to disk, not to simply make a copy of everything you put up. That is something it is not so easy to modidify.
It is amazing what people will claim. Have something to show the truth or falsity of those claims, should you be called on to do so. It costs nothing but a couple of minutes to protect yourself.
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