How to Sell Books with a Website An Author Website

Online Book Marketing

Forget everything you've ever heard or read about web design, it doesn't apply to authors building a platform to promote themselves or their books. If somebody starts telling you about web 2.0, focus on the "zero", for the relevance it has to what you're trying to accomplish. Don't look to the websites of your favorite authors for inspiration unless you never heard of them before you found their websites and bought their books. The websites of famous authors like Stephen King and Dan Brown, are not platforms for those writers, they are appendages. Don't try to imitate the websites of well known publishers, their websites are just a convenient place to publish press releases and display their frontlist titles. Most important of all, don't pay a website designer thousands of dollars to build you a website. You wouldn't pay $30 for a gallon of milk, so don't pay a website designer ten times what they're worth. Building an author platform isn't about technology or aesthetics, it's about content, and the only person who can create that content is you.

When publishers and agents ask about an author's platform, they don't mean a place where you can stand and talk. That's a podium. A platform is the thing the podium rests on, and in today's media drenched world, you can't get a place at the podium until you're a somebody in the eyes of the gatekeepers. If you're famous in your own right for some accomplishment or crime, you don't need to read this, but if you're an author who's hoping to break into publishing or sell more books, building a platform on the web is likely the best investment of time you'll ever make. It doesn't take long to start, it need never be "finished" and you can work on it when you have the spare time. Websites actually benefit from aging, so the sooner you start the better. But don't expect the overnight success that often goes hand-in-hand with stories of the online world. What you can expect is an incremental and measurable rise in your public profile, where you get back in proportion to what you put in. The idea isn't to compete with Wikipedia but to create a resource that goes much deeper their encyclopedic approach and offers something value added to your readers.

My inspiration for writing this book was attending the Cape Cod Writers Center in the summer 2007 and hearing the fear and doubt in the voices of authors seeking advice about creating a website to create a platform for breaking into trade publishing. The agents and editors in attendance, gatekeepers in their own right, made it clear to aspiring authors that a website has become a "must have." But the same agents and editors couldn't tell an author what that website should consist of, or how the author should go about it. Every time I heard somebody put a price on a website, I cringed, because those prices kept coming out in the mid-four figures. Somehow, $5,000 or $6,000 was seen as fair, and $2,000 or $3,000 as a great bargain. Having reviewed dozens, if not hundreds of website for authors over the years, I can tell you that I have yet to see a professionally designed website that was worth a tenth of the fee charged. Even worse, none of these websites had much chance of serving as an effective platform for the author. Some were aesthetically pleasing, others integrated tidbits of the latest technology, but not a single one of them was well conceived for the purpose of bringing new readers to the site to discover the author.

I could tell you that building a website so simple that you can master the software without even trying, but that would be like saying that anybody can easily learn to tune up a lawn mower. While tuning up a lawn mower really isn't a big deal, if you don't own a sparkplug socket and are intimidated by gaskets and gasoline, you'll probably end up frustrated and embarrassed. But you wouldn't hesitate to bring a lawn mower to a shop and pay $25 or $50 for some kid to tune it up, and you can purchase the same sort of "specialist" help with your website in the same price range, maybe even from the same kid! And if you're worried about the ongoing cost of ownership, the going rate for a quality website hosting service that makes your website available to everybody in the world, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, is $10 per month. Add to that the cost of purchasing a domain name for your website (the bit that comes between the "www" and the ".com" as in www.mywebsitedomainname.com), $30 per year for the most expensive service, and you can see that having your own website isn't going to break the bank.

Get it out of your mind for once and for all that creating a successful website for promoting your writing is a technical challenge. The challenge is to write compelling content for your website, to organize it so search engines like Google can understand it, and to pay attention to the results so you can improve your website as time permits. But beware! If the friends and family you've showed your writing tell you that you're crazy, and that nobody wants to read about the first thought that comes to your head when your alarm clock goes off at 2:57 AM for your daily stream of conscious writing exercise, they may be right. Likewise, it would be easy to build a website that would make you the acknowledged world expert on the arrangement of the junk in your basement, but your spouse is the only person in the world who would possibly be interested in the dissertation, and even that's a long shot. Hobbies and quirky interests are ideal for websites and niche books, whether fiction or nonfiction, because they have the potential to attract a self-identified audience. But there's a big difference between writing about a niche subject like the coastal towns of Maine and writing about the similarities between the bumps in your backyard and the toes on your right foot.