Building An Author Website

Why Does An Author Need A Website?

The publishing insiders in New York City have a buzz word they like throwing around in reference to author websites. That buzz word is "interactive". As usual when it comes to the Internet, they don't know what they're talking about. Not too long ago, I had a nice conversation with a gatekeeper on the literary fiction scene, and the subject came around to the need for authors to have their own website. The main point, she was quick to point out, it has to be interactive. I asked her what she meant by interactive, then grew sympathetic as she struggled to come up with any clarification. After all, I'd already told her I had a website that drew over 5,000 unique visitors a day, so according to her lights, it must be interactive and I must already know what it meant. So I prompted her, "Do you mean something with forms to fill out? A blog with comments? A storefront?" She wasn't really sure, but though it was important that the content should always be changing. To borrow a phrase, that's exactly wrong.

The Weather Channel needs front page content that's constantly changing (unless you live in Seattle) as do newspapers and fan sites. Author websites need content that is well written and remains the same. The idea here is to build a platform, which establishes and promotes the author as a somebody in their field of endeavor. If you're field of endeavor is journalism of the newsy sort, and you want to spend all of your time updating your website, then establishing your own news outlet may be the way to go. But what most authors have to offer is their writing style, their knowledge and their unique way of combining the two, commonly refered to as their "voice". When an author with a unique voice gets stuck revisiting the same story or subject over and over again, that's called a "rut". Most authors I know outside of academia prefer not to get stuck in ruts, even if they can make a living at it. So getting up every morning and writing about the same subject every day just isn't an attractive proposition. Fortunately, it's not a good strategy for a website either.

The most popular pages on my website never change at all. I just did a quick check, and 23 out of the top 25 pages on my site, which account for over 40% of the daily visitors, have remained essentially unchanged since I posted them. These include book excerpts, essays, and some how-to guides. The only two pages in my top 25 draws that I do update on a regular basis are my self publishing blog, which is updated several times a week, and my page about Amazon sales ranks, which is updated once or twice a year. I'll explain in more depth later about why these static pages draw more visitors than more dynamic content on author websites, but the short explanation is they succeed precisely because they remain the same, receiving only the occasional new coat of paint. Web pages are like real estate, value derives from location. Location on the Internet is defined by the links to your pages from other websites, and the neighborhoods those linking pages are in. The Internet search engines, particularly Google, give great weight to the real estate value of your website and individual pages, and are much more likely to send you visitors when your web page lives in a good neighborhood.

I've heard from aspiring authors who tell me they haven't bothered with a website yet because they don't have a book to sell. When they get a book published, they tell me, there will be plenty of time to build a website. But they have it backwards. You don't need a website in order to sell published books, there are plenty of bookstores willing to fill that function for you, including Amazon. Unpublished authors need a website to help sell their manuscript so it can get published, and then to help promote the book so the publisher will oblige them with royalty checks and new contract offers. A good portion of my book sales are generated by my website, especially for my self published books which I'm free to promote with large excerpts. But there are plenty of other ways to promote published books online that don't involve owning a website. If your goal is to self publish and sell books primarily through Amazon, then I would strongly recommend you read Aaron Shepard's "Aiming at Amazon" and if you want to promote your trade published book through social networking, the required text is Steve Weber's "Plug Your Book." While increasing book sales is a principal concern of this book, the main goal is platform building, and the website platform need not be tied to a single title or field of endeavor, as book promotion techniques are by definition.

When I get the itch to start writing about something new, I immediately start posting the rough drafts on my Internet site. I don't run the pages passed my editor, I barely read them over more than once myself. The idea is to have the new pages discovered by the search engines as soon as possible, and to start getting reactions from the people for whom I'm writing. The five different reactions I look for are unrelated to the five senses, but I like to think they give me a pretty complete picture of the world this new work is living in. The most important reaction I look for is positive feedback from readers. If complete strangers send me e-mails thanking me for taking the time to write the page or even asking when the book will be available, I know I've got a feasible book project on my hands. The second reaction I look for is bad feedback or people questioning my methods or conclusions. If people e-mail me suggesting I have it all wrong or asking me questions that I either don't understand or thought I already explained in full, I know that either I'm not reaching the right audience or they aren't finding the right website. In both instances, they certainly won't be giving me any links to increase the visibility of my work, and it may well be that I'm writing for an audience of one.

The third reaction I look for is from the search engines, how they rank my new content for related searches and whether they are sending me the type of visitors I expected. If I've posted a page that I thought would be an immediate popular success because my website already has authority in a related field, and instead, the search engines only send a handful of visitors a day, I generally get discouraged and give up. All right, I always get discouraged an give up. The fourth reaction I look for is the amount of time visitors to the page spend reading it. While not an exact measure, the average number means something, as in pages that are above average are probably being judged good reading. The fifth reaction I look for is external linking, how many people who've found the page choose to tell others about it, through links on their websites, in blog posts, in discussion groups, comments or published articles. All these external links show up in the search engines or in my own website monitoring program.

The strategy behind building an author website is not about selling more books today, or next month. It's about having your own strategic marketing asset for years to come. Most professional authors lead a hand-to-mouth existence, living from advance to advance, always trying to line up the next book contract, and the one after that, even before they finish grinding out the title they're working on at the present. One of the original reasons I started writing commercial nonfiction back in the mid-90's was that I was looking for a way to make living while remaining independent. What I found was that working as a trade author is just like having a job, except there aren't any employee benefits. Sure, the hours are flexible - sometimes you get to work twelve or more of them a day! You don't have to drag into an office every morning, instead you get to have your work staring you in the face 24x7. And if you start turning down new jobs or looking to improve contract terms, they stop calling, because there's always a new batch of innocent new authors willing to take your place.

But most authors, if they want to keep writing for a living, have limited choices. They never create an independent platform so their main professional qualification as an author is the books they have in print. When those books disappear from the shelves, the authors become yesterday's news. A well conceived website platform doesn't have an expiration date. Unlike online stores and social networking sites which live in fear of the next big thing to come along and destroy their business model, websites based on content retain their value as long as the content remains relevant. When I first started posting my writing to the web in 1995, I was sure that there was a ticking clock on the window of opportunity, that within a couple years, every college student and entrepreneur with a little Internet savvy would be creating wonderful websites for everything under the sun. As the years went by and it didn't happen, I came to realize that most people spend their online time as consumers, not as creators. Google became one of the world's biggest companies not because they do great search, but because they figured out that human beings are always shopping!

More than a decade later, it's become clear that the incredible growth of Internet content is concentrated around entertainment and socializing. There are literally millions of people with professional skills, from auto mechanics to brain surgeons, who answer questions for complete strangers in online forums every day. And those forums are very popular websites, as long as the questions and the answers continue. But very few people invest months or years of their time writing a book that comprehensively addresses all of the questions they are happy to answer in forums. Writing a book or building a website requires a long term commitment, with no guarantee of reward. Unlike being a forum participant, where you can pick and choose the questions you want to respond to, creating a genuine resource takes the sort of commitment to research that most people won't make, unless somebody is paying them a salary. And that's the whole secret of why building an online platform today is no more difficult than it was a decade ago. There's not nearly as much competition as you'd think.