Every author needs an online presence. If you’re selling a book online at Amazon or CreateSpace, existing and potential readers need to know that you are a serious author with a strong brand and established identity. Your website communicates your personality, genre and style. Therefore, it’s an extension of your writing and is one of the most effective marketing tools you can have.
As an author, you will rarely be around to convince thousands of potential readers of your writing prowess, explain your style and influences or tell them what titles you are working on and, regardless of whether you are planning to sell your book directly from your site or by using third-party selling platforms such as Amazon, your book sales success will be affected by how your potential readership perceive you. Your book cover shapes that perception, book reviews and your profile or ‘author brand’ as presented on your website. If an Amazon customer reads a glowing review for your book, but they cannot find out who you are to reinforce and validate their decision to buy, they may not commit to the purchase. It’s not their financial investment that is the deciding factor as much as the time investment they might be prepared to make into a serious author’s work. Your website also communicates the nature of your publishing brand; are you, the author, the leading brand element in the website, or is it the publishing name you’ve chosen for your ISBNs? Perhaps the site is dedicated to a particular book series instead of your author profile. There are many ways you can approach your site, and we can help you uncover the most appropriate one to help you be the kind of author you want to be.
Your website fulfils this need for communication and will be used by you to host a blog, redirect readers to the retail outlets for your work and, crucially, to make you searchable online. This may sound complex, but we create sites in WordPress or Joomla, which are Content Management Systems designed to allow you the freedom to update and maintain your site without needing any programming knowledge. We also build in a modular fashion. This means you can start with the basics such Home, Books and Contact pages, and then as time and budget allow, you can add on the various extras such as a blog, shop, news, and multimedia items like a gallery and video adverts for your titles etc. Once you have a book or two online, traffic will begin to flow to your site, and this is when you have a chance to impress your potential readership and turn them into loyal fans.