It’s one of the first questions I ask every author as we prepare for the design process: “Do you have a photo of yourself that we can use on the site?” Surprisingly, a good percentage of the time, the answer to that question begins with hees and haws. Most authors want to have a good […]
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If you’re an author using Facebook (and really, I hope you are), then you need to look at social networking as a piece of your business. That means analyzing it — just like you would any other advertising initiative — to determine what’s working and what’s a waste of your time. Enter Facebook Insights. Much
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As I’ve mentioned many times before, collecting email addresses is a great way for an author to stay in touch with a ready-made audience of followers. By putting together an email list, an author can contact readers (instead of waiting for readers to come back to their website) when they are ready to announce a
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Websites should be fun places to visit. They should be full of stories, tips, ideas, and things that can improve your life. Unfortunately, most author websites don’t do that. Too many authors use their website more as a portfolio — a place to feature their work and themselves, but not really offer anything of value
8 Ways to Make Your Author Website Less Boring Read More »
Every author wants to build a website that generates thousands of visitors (and hopefully, thousands of books sold). Richard Bard has done just that. In the five weeks since his website launched, he’s had 5,000 visitors and over 9,000 pageviews. That’s impressive! Richard has also been kind enough to take the time to answer some
Author Success Story: Richard Bard Read More »
It’s one of the most important aspects of building and maintaining a website: creating new content. Without it, an author website is nothing but a static portfolio that people may visit once, but they’re certain not to return. Yes, folks, creating new content is super-important. Not only does it help to get people to return
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Remember the old days of publishing: you’d get your book picked up by a publisher and then some magical publicity department would start booking you to do lots of high-profile signings and readings at book stores, schools, etc… My, how times have changed. Nowadays, authors have to do all of their own online publicity. Unless
Are Author Readings/Signings Worth It Any More? Read More »
One of my clients (thanks, Chip Wagar!) sent me a link a few days ago. He thought this article might be a good tool for me to use to stress the importance of author websites in today’s world of Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn. The article is called “Are You Digital Sharecropping Your Book Business.” I highly recommend it.
Why Only Doing Social Networking Can Be a HUGE Mistake for Authors Read More »
The results from the Book Industry Study Group’s “Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading” survey are now available! Thanks to Publishers Weekly magazine’s interpretation of the findings, here are the trends that we found to be important: Kindle and Nook are growing in popularity. Even those who were reading e-books before on different platforms are jumping
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Every author wants to know how to get lots of traffic to their website (and ultimately, sell lots of books). Well, Askhari Hodari is a great example of that success. She is co-author of two books and has two websites (one for each book). Best of all, she gets nearly 9,000 pageviews a month on
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