Today we’re going to give you tips, stats, and facts about having a writer’s website. Indie-published or traditionally published, you need this info to decide if a website is for you. We know our own answer, but you may come up with a different one for yourself.
The Internet Facts, Amazing and True
These facts are fairly mind-boggling. Okay, let’s be honest—they’re very mind-boggling.
1) Eight people go online every second. If those waves weren’t invisible, they would create one hell of a traffic jam. (And sometimes they do…)
2) There are at least ten billion—yes, billion with a ‘b’—Google searches each month.
3) This next one is pretty scary, but we’re giving it to you anyway. About one-third of the adults in the US spend at least three hours online every day.
4) Regarding number three above? Oh, no! When are people reading? When are they reading your book? This fact alone really hits home—your writing must fill a story need, and you must market your story to a specific audience. Don’t take on the world. It’s too big.
Digital publishing has changed writers’ lives. But as far as marketing goes, it doesn’t matter if you are published by a traditional house or if you are self-published. Social marketing has created a new planet for writers to explore and exploit. There is no need to groan beneath the weight of it. Use it!
Do You Want a Website? Or Need a Website?
If your website presence represents you and your work, and if you keep the site active, there is no stronger marketing tool that a writer can have. Your website is exactly the same as a bricks-and-mortar store. It is your home base, and it is from there that your books will fly to readers. That will happen mostly from the blog part of your website, but we’ll cover that in another post.
Last year I was hired by a big-time writer’s agent to build the writer a web presence. Even with this writer’s string of bestsellers, and thirty years in the writing biz, his publishing houses, his audio agency, and his agent felt he needed an online presence. I learned something from that.
We have become so accustomed to beauticians and businesses, even our doctors, having a website that we think something isn’t real about them unless they do. This thinking may be totally skewed, but who cares? It’s where our heads are, and there is no point denying it.
If you are a new writer, your website will help people find you and your work. If you’re a long-time writer, your website will gain you new readers and may bring readers back that you’ve lost.
GOOGLE is a Friendly, Active Verb
If a reader recommends your book to a friend, that person is probably going to Google you before they shell out bucks and buy your work. And, they want to know more about you than the just name of a book. They want to know if you’re a dog or a cat person, if you have kids, what your hobbies are and what you look like. Regardless of a reader’s recommendation, people are likely to make a final decision to buy your book based upon what they find on your website.
They may also find that you have other books or events that they’d be interested in. Oh, look! You come from their hometown! Now they are definitely buying your book. (Put your contact info on your website. They may want to write you. What could be better?) And then? That new readers may send your URL to another friend. Wonderful.
The word Google has become a very active word we use in everyday language.
This being true, here’s an important question to ask yourself: Can your readers find you online? We believe the best way for them to find you is from a hub called your website. Think of the website as the center of your marketing. Everything radiates from that center and goes out, like the roots of a tree, to find your reader. Just by color and tone alone, your reader will get an idea of what you have to offer.
What About the Foreign Market?
Another thought. If you are published in English, how are you going to reach readers in Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand, Ireland and the UK? In other words, in other English-speaking countries? Difficult unless you’re on the net. Do readers in England like to read vampire stories as much as Americans do? If they do, you are missing a decent chunk of your potential market if they can’t find you.
In our next installment, if you decide to go with a website, we’ll give you a few insider tips about how to be found on the vast Google network.
But Websites Are Expensive, Aren’t They? Yes and No.
Websites present an option for every budget. To start out, you won’t need more than three pages. One page will be About You and your contact info. Another page will be about your books. Your third page is your blog. If you want, you can just have two pages. About you and your book(s) will be on the same page. On this page you will have a link that sends a reader to the exact page, on every site, that carries your book.
Web-building Choices
1) Option One: Pay a website company to put a site together for you. For something as simple as a few pages with a blog, $1,200 should do it. If you want something that covers more territory, you’re looking at maybe $3,000. For any price, your website creator should walk you through how to post, how to change a page, how to make your entire site work. There are web designers who do not give you the keys to the magic kingdom when you send them a check. We think this is ridiculous. These folks charge you a monthly fee. If you want a change, you will have to run straight to them, and they’ll do it for another fee. That’s crazy.
2) Option Two: You may have a web-smart friend, relative or spouse who will put it all together for you. Check out websites first and give them an idea about what you want. Sketch out your idea. If they know Photoshop, that will make your design a lot easier and quite custom-feeling.
If you’re doing it, consider learning the Photoshop basics. (Not Creative Suite. That is hard, and you don’t need it.) You just need a few basic skills, the Photoshop program is inexpensive, and when you buy THE MISSING BOOK (please do), it’s not difficult to learn.
If your spouse is putting together your website, beware of arguments. Seriously, wars have broken out over less than a website. Sometimes they start interjecting their personality into your site. Make an agreement, first, that this is your baby and speaks in your voice.
3) Be adventurous! Do it yourself and make it very simple. With this option, consider using WordPress. WordPress 2011 and 2012 are easy templates. Experiment. You can use one of their headers, or you can make your own.
These basic WordPress templates have a blog page that works well, it is clean, and it is easy to learn how to post and comment. This option assumes that your life is already busy enough, and you have books to write! Learning to be a web designer is not necessary unless doing it really turns you on.
4) Option Four: You are a writer. Trade with someone who knows graphics and needs some decent copy for their business. How much copy they need will determine how much time they spend making your site. And, when you do a trade, remember to get the total website walk-through with them.
Naming Your Website
If you are a non-fiction writer, and you will write more than one book on the same subject, use that subject in your website name. Example: HowToMakeChewingGum.com.
If you write fiction, we suggest that you use your own name for your WordPress site. Otherwise there’s too much ground to cover.
Do I Need a Host, and What the Hell is a Host, Anyway?
Imagine a lot of bloated Frisbees hanging out together. Your host company has a lot of these Frisbees, and they are called servers. Your host will put your website on a server. You will share that piece of Frisbee server-pie with other websites. If you get very large, and you have tons of digital information, you would get your own server, and you would pay a lot of money for it. That’s pretty unusual for a writer.
Your host company charges a yearly fee somewhere in the neighborhood of $100+ to keep you on that server. (They also update your site, and if you screw up, or the digital universe does, they can back your website through time, and reset you to the day before. Been there, had to do that—it is a major relief.)
If you want to start simple, you won’t need a host, and your website space will be free. If you choose WordPress.com, your website URL will read www.janesmith.wordpress.com. Go to WordPress.com and take a spin through the templates and designs. See what you like. Have fun!
If you’d prefer your web address to read: www.janesmith.com, then grab your name from godaddy.com (check in through their 99-cent portal on Google), and head to WordPress.org.
For this option you will need a web host. We like Bluehost. They have always been there for us when we have questions or when we have, quite simply, screwed up. There are thousands of servers. Pick one that will give you good, personalized service. (We hate it when tech people talk to us as if we are morons. It makes us want to say, “Oh yeah! Lightning round … You have three seconds to tell us what a gerund is, and then use it in a sentence.”)
When Your Website is Finished
It doesn’t matter who breathed life into your website, there are a few things you want to check before you make your site visible to the world.
1) Look at it on as many formats as possible. Go from a large screen to your smart phone. An extraordinary number of people are using their iPads and phones to check out websites. You want to know what they are seeing.
2) Use different devices to check the color. When I made our website, the background looked blue on my screen. Sky blue. When I looked on Win’s computer it looked like an aging lilac corsage. So, I sat with both screens, futzing with the color, until they both looked blue. I also checked the site on my iPhone. Blue there, too. Phew. (If our site background looks purple on your computer, I don’t want to know. After all that work, I’d prefer to remain ignorant.)
Bottom Line
How many times has a friend said to you, “Have you seen this blog? I think you’d really like it!” And how many times have you said, “Hey, check out this website. It’s really cool.”
Around our house one of those sentences creeps into the conversation several times a day. It could be about a train trip or a great deal on a coffee press, a new writer, or a terrific book.
“Hey! Google this!” Or, “I sent you a URL. Check your e-mail for it” is part of our lives. Is it part of yours? And shouldn’t you have a website that people are passing around? We think so.
Jump in!
The Downside of Having a Website
1) You have to be active on your website.
2) You must keep your events posted. (Your signing events will appreciate that you’ve named them on your website. They feel you’re a pro, and you’ll handle the signing well. They are also a lot more likely to set up a signing if you have a website presence. You are, after all, real. Wait … That didn’t sound like a reason not to have a website. Ignore this.)
Next Up
You may be asking, “Okay, I have a website. How-oh-how do I get search engines like Google to notice me? And what is all this SEO (Search Engine Optimization) stuff? Do writers really need it?”
Our next newsletter will cover some tricks, from free to almost-free, to take the mystery out of SEO.
And, Just Before That?
Another Free Book is Coming Your Way!
Watch for it.
Best—Meredith and Win
About Meredith and Win Blevins
Thanks for your informative, down-to-earth, practical advice. You always give me hope and inspiration!!
Karsen — I’m so sorry it has taken us this long to reply!
As for ourselves, we appreciate your thanks. We appreciate your good words! Thank you for taking the time to write to us.
W & M
Thank you as always. My wife and I taught dancing part time so I built a simple website for that using a service. I think it is fun to build it but depends how fancy you want it. I do need to start looking around at other writers’ sites to get some ideas. I look forward to reading about SEO as I was just starting to get familiar with that when we slowed down the teaching and we no longer needed the traffic. A related question: with a traditional publishing firm, how much of the marketing do theyy expect the writer to do? Thanks again.
And here’s a thought, Dennis. Look at other writer’s sites, but also look at sites that involve the setting, etc., of your writing. One word here — some sites look like glossy magazines. Unless your content is current, faddish, fashion, food, etc., don’t go to that visual.
A traditional publisher will do little in the way of marketing. If you want to sell books, don’t leave that part to them.
They have their own form of marketing that you cannot do, ever, in your wildest dreams. They can make deals for book placement. They send out advanced reading copies to book reviewers. If they believe in your book, they will market you to large avenues of placement.
They rarely get involved in social media marketing or websites. That’s up to you, and showing them you know what you’re doing by having your own active web presence, will help endear you to your editor. Always a good thing.
Thank you. Those are great tips. Time to do some research.
Wonnerful! I am so glad I followed your advice and started mine! And it is lovely to see traffic on it (and on the Outlawed Hope page!). As for the blog, me keepin’ it hoppin’ and having fun with it. Win-Win!
Am following YOUR blog intently and learning–always fun, too.
You have so much to say, Na’ama, so a blog is particularly perfect for you. And, just like furniture, if it comes from the writer it is all going to create a whole. It will ‘match’.
Some people get hung up thinking they have to write variations about their books’ themes, etc. No. Let us know YOUR theme. Let us know how you see the world. This helps us know if we’ll like your books. And all of that is exactly what you do. You play with your blog, and it is a delight. Everyone, enjoy your blog. Go wherever your mind and heart take you. We love that.
best — meredith