• Build a website to promote your new book
For very little money, authors easily can build a website with just limited knowledge of how they’re constructed or how they work. How do you do that, you ask?
• Decide what website will look like
Before constructing your website or even deciding what pages you’ll have on your website, you’ll need to think about what the website page should look like. While each page will differ slightly – one might be a collection of publicity photos that can be downloaded while another is primarily a sample chapter of your book – each page should contain certain elements that are consistent throughout your site.
• Pages needed for your website
Once you’ve determined the appearance of your website, the next step is to plan how it’ll be organized. This is called the site architecture. You’ll decide what pages will be on your website and the order in which they will be arranged.
• Ensure your book’s website is navigable
A major factor to consider about constructing your website promoting your book is how visitors will be able move between all of the pages you’ve constructed for them. The ability to do this is called navigation.
• How to construct your website’s home page
The first page of your website that most potential readers and the media likely will see is your home page. This page serves as an introduction to your book.
• Offer readers a sample chapter page on website
If the book you’re promoting is the first one you’ve published, readers most likely will be unfamiliar with you or your writing. Further, given the vast number of other authors out there, a potential reader might decide to pass over you for another one who is slightly better well known or who has more writing credits to their name. You can counterbalance this by giving readers a free sample of your writing, proving to them that you’re the superior writer with the best book.
• Construct a ‘What Others are Saying’ web page
Often readers make book purchases based on what others – friends, family, similar-minded readers, critics – say about the title. There are reasons sites like Goodreads and Amazon.com reviews are so popular. Before laying down money, readers like to see if a book was entertaining, stimulating or useful. Your own website can contain favorable excerpts from such reviews and articles. The more such commentary you can place on the page, the better.
• Offer readers ‘Interview with the Author Page’
Readers love to learn about the authors of their favorite books. You can help foster that love – and in doing so get them to purchase your next book – by including a page on your website in which you are interviewed.
• Add contact page to your book’s website
A Contact page provides information about how to reach the author or whoever is responsible for handling your communications (executive assistant, agent, manager, etc.).
• Offer your readers a photo gallery page
If you’re serious about receiving media attention – either from newspapers and magazines or from bloggers and online journals – you’ll want to have a photo gallery page on your website. After you’ve been interviewed or if your book is being reviewed, that writer will want pictures of you that can be used with the piece.
• Add share buttons to your book’s website
When building a website to promote your books(s), one element to include on each page is a share button. A share button allows visitors to literally tell the world about your page.
• How to promote multiple books on your website
If you’ve written multiple books, the big question facing you is if your website should focus on you the author or on the latest book you’ve published.
• Create sales page on website for your ebook
A great way to increase your ebook sales is to offer it for purchase directly from your website. This would be done not via a link to your ebook’s Amazon.com landing page but by installing the actual ability to purchase and download it from your website.
• How to put a “buy now” button for your website
If you sell your books or services from your own website, you’ll want to take the time to set up a “buy now” button there. With a buy now button, readers or clients can make a payment via credit card with just a click.
• How to accept credit card purchases on your site
One of the main reasons authors lose book sales online is that potential readers have no immediate way to make purchases. This is true even when the author’s web page includes a link that brings readers back to an Amazon.com listing page, a Zazzle page, or a similar site, which the reader doesn’t find or simply never clicks.
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But the reality is that unless you’re satisfied with your book languishing in anonymity, you need a marketing plan. You’ll need to send press releases to media outlets. You’ll need a website and probably a blog to inform people about your book. You’ll need to do some book signings, some book readings, maybe some radio interviews. You may need to make some business cards and even advertise.
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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional book editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past decade, I’ve helped more than 400 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of 80 books including the Storytelling 101 writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.
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