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

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

by | Mar 19, 2013 | Book Promotion, Writing | 8 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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

 

You may also like:

WordPress for authors and writers (part one)

WordPress for authors and writers (part three)

WordPress for authors and writers (part four)

by Ben Zackheim

Does advertising on Goodreads work? (Part 2)

Does advertising on Goodreads work? (Part 2)

by | Feb 18, 2013 | Book Promotion, Writing | 15 comments

This is a follow-up to a previous post.

I’ve received some feedback on my post about advertising on Goodreads, and it looks like some people are interested in getting into Goodreads, but haven’t made the plunge yet. This sequel is for you!

The thing I like about Goodreads is that it’s filled with readers of all ages. The best way to get to know people who share your tastes is search their groups. I’m still seeking out my niche, but I’ve found lots of helpful and supportive people by just making a page for myself .

If you’re an author you can either “claim” the books you’ve written, or you can upload your book data manually. Once you have an author page with books you can start to find friends by joining group discussions. The best way to sum it up is that Goodreads, while a bit obtuse, is a microcosm of all the reading/writing forums you’ve ever joined on the Web. It’s a wild west of discussions and contests and promotions. The benefit for the author is that you only interact with dedicated book lovers.

Goodreads started a service called Goodreads Self-serve Ads. You can buy, for up to 50 cents per click, ad space on the right or left column of some of their pages. The ads consist of a small image, ad copy and a link to wherever you want. You can set aside any amount as your budget (I chose 10 bucks) and you can track your ad’s performance.

The big benefit of ads on Goodreads is that everyone who sees the ad is more likely than the public at large to be interested in your ad. Still, to ensure you get the most bang for your buck Goodreads allows you to target your ad, meaning you can offer the ad to certain kinds of Goodreads customers. They allow you to show your ads ONLY to people who like (for instance) mystery and YA. You can choose as many genres as you’d like to target, but it’s a fine line you’ll walk in trying to target correctly.If you target too broadly you risk getting people clicking on your ad who are not interested in your kind of book. That’s wasted money. Conversely, if you target too specifically you can filter out perfectly good customers and not see anyone click on your ad at all.

You can also target customers by the author they like, which is an interesting filter that I plan to test out in my next campaign. I need to find out from my current readers who they think I’m similar to!

Advertising on Goodreads

As you can see in the image below, I set my daily budget to 2 bucks. That meant I was planning to pay for a max of 4 clicks on my ad (they charge up to 50 cents per click). I set 10 bucks as the campaign budget, meaning I planned on eventually paying for 20 clicks at 50 cents each. As you can see from the views data, a lot of people had the ad put in front of their faces. A “view” is simply defined as “your ad showed up on the person’s web page”. Goodreads can’t actually guarantee that someone saw and read the ad, they can only tell me that 116,129 people had the ad served to a page that they loaded. Of those 116, 129 Goodreads people, 20 people clicked on my ad. That is .02%

Goodreads ads

While that sounds miserable, it’s a middling result. A super success would be half a percent point considering that Goodreads doesn’t give you a sexy place on their page to put your ad. In the final analysis I got some exposure for my book series brand, and 20 people showed interest in buying the books.

Lessons learned

And here is where I learned my biggest lesson. Because I don’t have a sale page on my personal website where I can track traffic, I can’t see how many people actually bought the books. I can look at the dates when the ads ran and guess but that’s not a good way to measure these things. My conclusion is that it’s best to have a page with a shopping cart on your own site so you can check the traffic for your site and see “oh, he came from Goodreads.com and he bought a copy on my site.” This way you can see how successful the ad campaign is AND tweak your ad and/or purchase experience next time around.

I’ve learned about a trick and I plan to use it on my next book. According to Tom Corson-Knowles, you can track conversion on Amazon pages by placing an image of yourself in your book description. The image should be hosted by you and served from a bit.ly url. The bit.ly url will allow you to go to the bit.ly site and check traffic for the link. This way you can find out a bunch of user data on who went to your Amazon book page from Goodreads. I haven’t tried this on my Amazon profile because I use Amazon’s Author Central, which does not allow html in their profile form. However, if you are on KDP and have not signed up for Author Central, you CAN use the KDP profile form to enter html, including the bit.ly link. There are some tricks to it and I advise that you buy the three dollar book on Amazon, or borrow it if you’re on Amazon Prime. It’s worth it. It appears that Amazon has changed their policy. I tried to use this trick on a new book using KDP and my html was rejected. As of now, I’m not aware of a way to see traffic to your Amazon page.

Goodreads, for their part, advises ad buyers to make their ads link to the book’s Goodreads page. The Goodreads customer likes their ads to stay within the Goodreads ecosystem because they’re loyal and enjoy the experience.

I saw an uptick in my ads’ performance (known as CTR, or “click through rate”) when I did two things:

  • Updated the copy. I went for the soft sell, instead of the hard sell. I toned down the language and removed the “Get the book for Xmas”-type wording. The hard sell doesn’t work well on Goodreads.
  • I changed the ad so it linked to Goodreads instead of Amazon. This made the link at the bottom of the ad read “Goodreads” instead of “Amazon” which, again, appears to be what Goodreads customers prefer.

I hope this post now makes it clear what the benefits of Goodreads is as a platform and as a place to advertise.

by Ben Zackheim

Top 5 writing contests

Top 5 writing contests

by | Feb 12, 2013 | Book Promotion, Writing | 37 comments

If you’re searching for the best way to submit to fiction writing contests, you may be a bit overwhelmed. There are hundreds of options that range from scams to high-exposure, free-to-enter blockbusters. Through a lot of trial and error, some research and a propensity to have strong opinions about one thing or another, here’s what I’ve discovered.

(Please note that I focus on contests that offer the widest range of entry requirements. None of the contests, as of this writing, require your story to be about food, technology, zebras or any of the other rules that contests force upon us.)

The top 5 writing contests

Here are the top 5 writing contests, as measured by BANG! for buck.

Benjamin Franklin Awards

Independent Book Publishers Association runs this one. I’m a member, but don’t get any dough for recommending them. The cost is $225 for non-members (which includes one year membership to IBPA). While there is no cash prize, the competition has a lot of cred. It’s been around for 25 years. First call deadline: September 30th, 2016. Final deadline: December 15th, 2016.

Writer’s Digest Writing Competitions

Writer’s Digest has a pretty good rep as a place for authors to find useful advice and tools/services. Their contests have thousands of dollars in prizes, but more importantly, they have clout. Not Klout. Real clout ;-)

All the contests, except the Your Story writing contest, cost something — but not more than $110. Prizes include cash, up to $3000.

Writer’s Digest Annual Writing Competition (their catch-all contest which allows almost everyone to enter). 

Short story Competition

Self-Published Book Awards

Popular Fiction Awards

Your story (this one is free and the winner’s 750 word story is published in their magazine) Rolling submission deadlines, so enter away

The IPPY Awards

Entry per category for the first book was $75. Winners get a nice flood of exposure, notably through Publisher’s Weekly publications and emails. Deadline, February 25th, 2017.

 National Book Foundation

These guys have been around forever. Lots of cred, a little on the stuffy side, and a nice, big deal if you place in the competition. They’ll take books from small publishers, but no self-published books are allowed. The cash prizes are up to $10,000 They have $125 fee per submission, which they’ll take off your hands during the submission process. (Thanks to Jennie Goutet for pointing out a rule change)

Inkitt Amour

This is a bit more specific than the other contests but Romance is eternally hot and I want all of you to know about it. The Inkitt Amour contest is more like a publishing deal. A good one. In fact, I thin it’s where traditional publishing is going. Check out the perks:

$6,000 in Book Marketing
A dedicated marketing team
Professional editing & cover
25% Royalties

The 25% royalty means that this is a contest for talented newcomers who want to build a fan base. You can do better in percentage profit on your own. But will you have your own marketing team dedicated to making your book a success?

Okay, looks like this post is now the Top 6 contests!

Amazon’s Kindle UK Storyteller Award

Amazon’s back in the game! After phasing out their annual literary award they’ve launched the Kindle UK Storyteller Award. Here’s the deal:

Competition entry period begins at 00:01 (GMT) on 20th February 2017 until 23:59 (BST) on 19th May 2017 (the “Entry Period”). To enter, during the Entry Period you must go to the Kindle Direct Publishing (“KDP”) sign-in page at (https://kdp.amazon.com) (you may select the language for your region in the upper right corner of the page) and follow the instructions to upload and publish to KDP an original, previously unpublished, English-language book authored solely by you (the “Book” or the “Entry”), and include the exact phrase “StorytellerUK2017” in the “keywords” metadata field in order for us to identify your Entry. Entry into the Competition also requires that you have an Amazon account and a completed KDP account and you have accepted the KDP Terms of Service and the Terms and Conditions for KDP Select Program located at (https://kdp.amazon.com/terms-and-conditions)

The prize? A cool £20,000 and a prize ceremony in London. Classy.

Go shopping!

Don’t see a contest that you like here?

Browse two local booksellers!

Skim the shelves where your book will one day be prominently placed (if there’s any justice in the universe). You’ll find stickers or emblems on some books with contests/competitions that the publisher felt were worthy of mentioning up front. These are usually the big boy awards, but you’ll also find some niche awards this way, too.

Try it, it’s fun! You get to scour books and work at the same time!

Gotchas!

Be careful of two things.

One, rights. Make sure the fine print doesn’t lay claim to your work. You’re not giving them the right to anything, except the privilege of giving you an award for your great writing. A number of contests offer publication of your work as a prize, and if that’s what you want then go for it. Just be careful they don’t overreach.

Two, rules. You don’t want to prepare your submission and then find that your story exceeds the limit by a thousand words!

Don’t rush in. Read the teeny, tiny, itsy, weeny print. It’s adorable!

Free or fee?

Should you pay, or should you go for the free contests only? That’s a tough one, since most of us are made of 90% water, and 0%  money.

The bottom line is that if the contest is perfect for you, and you’ve checked your writing with a pro editor, then it’s worth paying something.

Important point: It’s best to set out with a budget for contests before you start looking for which ones to enter. You don’t want to go broke when your ambition starts arguing with your income. In my experience, ambition can be a hell of a debater.

Finally, when you have a list of five contests, STOP! One way to make sure you never catch a bunny is to chase two at the same time, right? So focus on your top five. No more for now. You can get to more when you’re done submitting to the ideal choices.

 

You won! Now what?

If you win, or earn a finalist/honorable mention title, then the hard work starts.

  • Announce it everywhere. Tout it on your Twitter/Facebook/ G+/Amazon author/Goodreads profiles.
  • Post a press release with the award name next to your name in the H1 of your site. This way Google will make the association between you and the award. If enough people pick up the story (don’t forget to leverage friends and fans!) your chances of having your name attached to the award’s name in search results grows.
  • Add the award to your email signature.
  • Resubmit the story to any agents or editors you’ve reached out to. Winning an award usually pushes the reset button so it’s worth a shot.

Conclusion

Contests are a great way to hone your craft and show the world how much better you are than that other dude writing over there. The one with the empty coffee cup, who’s been hogging the electrical output,

Now head on over to Poets and Writers website and dig into their awesome list of writing contests! You can also see a current list of contests here. And good luck.

 

Wait! More!

I’ll add to this list as I run across reputable and influential contests. Be sure to these check out, too.

by Ben Zackheim

Are you trying to find a good website theme for your author site? Check out my post, packed with excellent ideas!

WordPress themes for writers and authors

And if you want to get to know KDP better, read on:

The $1.1 Million question: Is KDP Select worth it?

Amazon KDP Select has a bridge to sell you! No, really.



 

 

Does advertising on Goodreads work? (Part 1)

Does advertising on Goodreads work? (Part 1)

by | Feb 11, 2013 | Book Promotion, Writing | 4 comments

Does advertising on Goodreads work? My first step into their self-serve ad system shows promise. I know there’s interest in the writing community about advertising on Goodreads, so I thought I’d share the results of my first (ten bucks!) campaign.

I advertised two middle grade books in my Shirley Link series. The campaign started 12-6-2012.

While I’m somewhat pleased with the overall views, I can’t measure the actual sales since Amazon and BN.com are black boxes. I plan on making my own landing page for sales so I can measure conversion next time! Sigh. I knew that, but I didn’t account for it. No soup for me!

I targeted one ad using genres and authors as filters. I used no targeting for the other ad. The ctr was higher for the targeted ad (.01 vs. .02).

daily cap $2.00
total credit purchased $10.00 transactions
total views 116,129
total clicks 20
ctr for all time 0.02%
cpc for all time $0.50

The ten bucks started to go quickly, but after a couple of days it dropped to a trickle. I probably wouldn’t have spent the whole ten bucks if I hadn’t redone the creative on one book, including copy. I also adjusted the link for the ad and made it point to my Goodreads page, and not to my books’ Amazon pages. That simple move seems to have pushed it over the top and my ten bucks quickly got spent. Another benefit of linking to Goodreads page is that I saw a spike in my books being added to Goodreads shelves. It implies that the Goodreads community likes to stay on the site. It also implies (though I have no proof) that Goodreads gives preferential treatment to ads that link to their book pages, and not someone else’s.

[divider divider_type=”gradient”][/divider]

[blockquote author_name=”” width=”50%” float=”left”]My goals for next campaign:

Get a full half percent ctr (you read that right! .5, not .05!)

Track my custom sales page![/blockquote]

[blockquote author_name=”” width=”50%” float=”left”]Lessons learned:

Make a product/landing page that you can track!

Target the ad, but not too strictly. Limiting it to a few genres and several authors is a good place to start.

Adjust the ad when the views drop. Change the copy and graphic, if possible.

For first-timers/dabblers advertising on Goodreads: If you don’t have a landing page of your own where you can sell the book directly, then point the ad to your Goodreads page, NOT an online retailer. Since it’s probably really attractive to link to the online retailers (just to see what happens) I’d wait to do it on your second campaign. That way you can spot your own ad’s performance and adjust around the most important part…the conversion![/blockquote]

Read Part 2 of this series

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

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

by | 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