Tip for Writers | Ben Zackheim

WordPress for writers: Build an author website with WordPress (Part Two)

by Ben Zackheim | Mar 19, 2013 | Book Promotion, Writing | 7 comments

To read about how WordPress can help writers, see Part One!

In my experience, authors are hesitant to sell. That’s okay, as long as they do it anyway. (Tweet this instantly!)

I’m not going to tell anyone what their site should be. Only you know what you want to get out of it. You may just want to tell stories. Blog. Podcast. Post pics of cats. But if you want to use your site to highlight you and your books then I have some pretty strong, and well-tested, opinions. After years at Viacom, Sony, ESPN and AOL, building games and game sites, I can tell you that selling something requires focus.

With focus in mind, here’s what every fiction author website must do:

Highlight the books

Have one or two strong calls to action (sign-up for newsletter, buy, download)

Include blogging, video, illustrations, SOMETHING to keep folks coming back twice a month.

What does an author website need to have? BaB!

I call these fundamentals, BaB, which stands for Books/action/Blog.

Why BaB? Because it wraps up what your book site is all about. Selling yourself and your books.

Think about it for a moment. If you stumble on a site that’s selling something, you’ll visually scan it and, whether you know it or not, you’re making a lot of judgments in a split second.

Is it pretty? Assuming you don’t go with a puke pink palette, Wordpress will help make that first impression go well. That’s one of WordPress’ biggest advantages. You need to work hard to make it look bad.
What is being sold and does it look good? Get the best book cover you can afford and highlight it with a WordPress product page. I’ll cover the top themes with product pages in a later post.
What else is here for me? News? Advice? Videos? Contests? Podcasts? Ways to share? Which social network is important to this writer? Is the site worthy of bookmarking?

By executing on the above three points, your site will do the most important thing it can do for you …

…show the reader what your priorities are…

You know how biz folks are always talking about how smart people remove all obstacles to buying a product? The same holds true of site design. Don’t make me think! Do not assume that I found your site because I wanted to see your book, or you. Odds are I did a search and stumbled on you. Now it’s up to you to convert me. Yeah, it’s like sprinting from a standstill. It’s hard, but you have to try.

Want to see what I mean? Okay, go to Jay Asher’s author page.

I’m not nuts about the overall design, but all the elements of BaB are there, and they’re in the right place. Notice the big honkin’ Buy Button in the upper left, which is where most eyes land when they first look at a page. I’m asked to buy before I even know what the product is! But that’s okay because, lo and behold, there’s the pic of the book. Now I know I’m on an author’s site. Jay gives more prominence to News than to Reader Reviews, which is odd, but they’re both really obvious from the get-go.

In the top menu I see there are a whole bunch of reasons for me to come back to the site if I like the book. There are links to his blog and to videos that tie in with his books. The site is bookmarkable. I would also follow the site, which I’ll explain in a later post.

So, yes, Jay Asher’s site has BaB! The books and buy action are tied at the hip on the top of the page, which is how it should be. And there’s content to keep the reader coming back to see what he and his characters are up to next.

Maggie Stiefvater‘s site tackles things in a different way. But let’s check out what she does and (maybe) why. Does Maggie have BaB?

It’s a design-heavy site, with a long load time, but when it does load it intrigues (just like her writing). She knows her audience (young adults) and her pub has made a judgment that the design of the site must capture her audience’s eye and let them know they are definitely in the right place. Since Maggie is busy building a very potent brand, where she is the product, she’s very prominent. Still, notice the biggest words on the page? “Welcome Reader”. She knows that she needs to let folks who don’t know her well that they’re on a writer’s site. Books are here. If you navigate to the books, you’ll find a very succinct and pretty presentation. You can also get fresh content if you come back to the site for her blog.

But this is where things fall apart. Where can I buy her books? Nowhere. I need to either search for the books manually on my site of preference, or go to one of the books’ official sites. From there I can find a Where to Buy section waaaay down on the page. Maybe the publishers figure she has a big enough name so they don’t need to worry about losing sales. But even the slightest bump in the road to purchase is lost money.

I’ve noticed this weakness in a lot of big publishers’ author pages. Maybe they know something I don’t know, but I’d say a design that hides the buy button isn’t doing anyone any favors. Including the readers.

So enough with the studies. How can you take this simple concept of BaB and apply it to your site with WordPress? We’ll explore the answer in the next post.

See what a good landing page needs to have to get the job done. And read part three of my series on WordPress for authors and writers.

WordPress for writers: Build an author website with WordPress (Part One)

by Ben Zackheim | Jan 24, 2013 | Book Promotion, Writing | 0 comments

This is Part One of an ongoing series that will look into WordPress tools that do specific things we fiction writers must do.

With as little effort as possible, of course. We have writing to do!

One of the toughest, and most satisfying, tasks that I’ve had to tackle as a writer of fiction is my website. When I decided to follow my dream of yarning-it-up for a living, I knew that a site would be one of those dreaded (scary cello music) THINGS YOU MUST DO!

After all, how can anyone get by without their digital stamp on our collective Web brain? Sure, it’s possible, even likely, that no one will show up, but, hey, what if they do?

I was slow to get mine up and running. Writing, after all, is my focus. Who has time to go beyond securing the domain before the other guy with your name snags it?

With my background in corporate America, I tried very hard to make my site’s creation as difficult as possible. Surely there was no such thing as a one-size-fits-all platform for me to leverage. Surely, it would be tougher than simply finding one web service. Nonono, I’d have to find one service to enable sharing, another service to pretty the site up, another to build the foundation, another to place ads, blahblahblah.

Oh, and I’d have to pay for all of it. One way or another.

Then I followed the advice of a friend, and tried WordPress.

1. WordPress is mind-blowingly stupendous for writers.

(yes, i’m a fan)

For newbies out there, WordPress lets you create a site that can do absolutely anything. Blog thoughts, sell books, run ads, launch contests, evaluate traffic, quantify your hard work against a million criteria.

In a word, WordPress is the single best web product and service ever built. Yes, that’s hard to quantify, but damned if I’m even going to try. WordPress speaks for itself.

It is the one-stop shop I never thought could be built. It has everything I need. Awesome designs (called themes), social network sharing tools, SEO plug-ins, ad widgets, html boxes, A/B testing, ~~cheap gasoline~~. All drag-and-drop-easy. And most are as free as air currently is.

2. WordPress is gut-wrenchingly distracting to writers.

My favorite built-in feature is the theme switching. I can download a new theme, preview it, and even push it into the world without losing any aspect of the hard work I’ve done on my real site. In all, I’ve only switched designs permanently once (it took about 15 minutes to make it work like I wanted). But I’ve tested a couple of hundred themes, which is great fun.

And a huge distraction.

With all of the themes available, I found it tough to settle on one for a couple of reasons:

There were too many options.
My needs are, shall we say, “fluid”.

Sound familiar? Yeah, I thought so. I’ve spoken to dozens of writers who tell me they suffered through their own lack of focus when building their corner of the WWW. Some got caught up in the cool plug-ins. Some were wandering the massive catacombs of drag-n-drop widgets. Most were in my boat, ogling themes until the morning coffee brewed.

After months of grappling with the immense toolset like a supervillain with all the power in the world, I realized something that I hope will save you tons of time, and free you up to write a novel that sells better than mine.

What is that thing?

Focus.

In the next post, I’ll give my opinion of what makes a good WordPress writer site. It starts with a focused author, who doesn’t mind getting into the weeds just a little. Read part two now.

by Ben Zackheim

Shirley Lock becomes Shirley Link, because that’s her name.

by Ben Zackheim | Jul 29, 2012 | Shirley Link & The Safe Case, Top Menu | 4 comments

Well that didn’t go as planned.

After months of preparation for the launch of my new chapter book series, Shirley Lock, I released it to the world on the 3rd of July, 2012. A big day!

I’d put off writing professionally for decades, in my quest to make a lot of money doing boring work. The pent-up desire to tell stories was reaching critical mass. So, as I pressed the “publish” button on CreateSpace and Amazon KDP, it felt like losing 450 pounds in a split second.

I always knew that it would be tough to put my neck out there with a book. It’s hard for every writer and artist to release their work into the big, bad world. I was nervous. But I was ready!

Or was I?

One hour into promoting my newly released book, I got two messages on Facebook from “Friends”. The messages were posted on one of my promotional posts announcing Shirley Lock & The Safe Case.

One comment read, “What the HELL…”

The other comment read “Do you have something you want to tell us?”

Since my wife knew them better than I did, I asked her if she had any idea why these two were posting such cryptic messages on the first promotional post for my book. She said she was chatting with one of them on her computer.

He was claiming we stole his idea.

(more…)

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