How to Sell Books with an Author Platform

Building a Book Marketing Website For Publishers and Authors

Forget everything you've ever heard or read about web design, it doesn't apply to authors building a platform to promote themselves or their books. If somebody starts telling you about web 2.0, focus on the "zero", for the relevance it has to what you're trying to accomplish. Don't look to the websites of your favorite authors for inspiration unless you never heard of them before you found their websites and bought their books. The websites of famous authors like Stephen King and Dan Brown, are not platforms for those writers, they are appendages. Don't try to imitate the websites of well known publishers, their websites are just a convenient place to publish press releases and display their frontlist titles. Most important of all, don't pay a website designer thousands of dollars to build you a website. You wouldn't pay $30 for a gallon of milk, so don't pay a website designer ten times what they're worth. Building a book marketing website isn't about technology or aesthetics, it's about content, and the only person who can create that content is you.

When publishers and agents ask about an author's platform, they don't mean a place where you can stand and talk. That's a podium. A platform is the thing the podium rests on, and in today's media drenched world, you can't get a place at the podium until you're a somebody in the eyes of the gatekeepers. If you're famous in your own right for some accomplishment or crime, you don't need to read this, but if you're an author who's hoping to break into publishing or sell more books, building a book marketing website is likely the best investment of time you'll ever make. It doesn't take long to start, it need never be "finished" and you can work on it when you have the spare time. Websites actually benefit from aging, so the sooner you start the better. But don't expect the overnight success that often goes hand-in-hand with stories of the online world. What you can expect is an incremental and measurable rise in your public profile, where you get back in proportion to what you put in. The idea isn't to compete with Wikipedia but to create a resource that goes much deeper their encyclopedic approach and offers something value added to your readers.

My inspiration for writing this material was attending the Cape Cod Writers Center in the summer 2007 and hearing the fear and doubt in the voices of authors seeking advice about building a website to create a platform for breaking into trade publishing. The agents and editors in attendance, gatekeepers in their own right, made it clear to aspiring authors that a website has become a "must have." But the same agents and editors couldn't tell an author what that website should consist of, or how the author should go about it. Every time I heard somebody put a price on a website, I cringed, because those prices kept coming out in the mid-four figures. Somehow, $5,000 or $6,000 was seen as fair, and $2,000 or $3,000 as a great bargain. Having reviewed dozens, if not hundreds of website for authors over the years, I can tell you that I have yet to see a professionally designed website that was worth a tenth of the fee charged. Even worse, none of these websites had much chance of serving as an effective platform for the author. Some were aesthetically pleasing, others integrated tidbits of the latest technology, but not a single one of them was well conceived for the purpose of bringing new readers to the site to discover the author.

I could tell you that building a website so simple that you can master the software without even trying, but that would be like saying that anybody can easily learn to tune up a lawn mower. While tuning up a lawn mower really isn't a big deal, if you don't own a sparkplug socket and are intimidated by gaskets and gasoline, you'll probably end up frustrated and embarrassed. But you wouldn't hesitate to bring a lawn mower to a shop and pay $25 or $50 for some kid to tune it up, and you can purchase the same sort of "specialist" help with your website in the same price range, maybe even from the same kid! And if you're worried about the ongoing cost of ownership, the going rate for a quality website hosting service that makes your website available to everybody in the world, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, is $10 per month. Add to that the cost of purchasing a domain name for your website (the bit that comes between the "www" and the ".com" as in www.mywebsitedomainname.com), $30 per year for the most expensive service, and you can see that having your own website isn't going to break the bank.

Get it out of your mind for once and for all that creating a successful website for promoting your writing is a technical challenge. The challenge is to write compelling content for your website, to organize it so search engines like Google can understand it, and to pay attention to the results so you can improve your website as time permits. But beware! If the friends and family who've read your books tell you that you're crazy, and that nobody wants to read about the first thought that comes to your head when your alarm clock goes off at 2:57 AM for your daily stream of conscious writing exercise, they may be right. Likewise, it would be easy to build a website that would make you the acknowledged world expert on the arrangement of the junk in your basement, but your spouse is the only person in the world who would possibly be interested in the dissertation, and even that's a long shot. Hobbies and quirky interests are ideal for websites and niche books, whether fiction or nonfiction, because they have the potential to attract a self-identified audience. But there's a big difference between writing about a niche subject like the coastal towns of Maine and writing about the similarities between the bumps in your backyard and the toes on your right foot.

The publishing insiders in New York City have a buzz word they like throwing around in reference to publisher and author websites. That buzz word is "interactive". As usual when it comes to the Internet, they don't know what they're talking about. Not too long ago, I had a nice conversation with a gatekeeper on the literary fiction scene, and the subject came around to the need for authors to have their own website. The main point, she was quick to point out, it has to be interactive. I asked her what she meant by interactive, then grew sympathetic as she struggled to come up with any clarification. After all, I'd already told her I had a website that drew over 5,000 unique visitors a day, so according to her lights, it must be interactive and I must already know what it meant. So I prompted her, "Do you mean something with forms to fill out? A blog with comments? A storefront?" She wasn't really sure, but though it was important that the content should always be changing. To borrow a phrase, that's exactly wrong.

The Weather Channel needs front page content that's constantly changing (unless you live in Seattle) as do newspapers and fan sites. Author websites need content that is well written and remains the same. The idea here is to build a platform, which establishes and promotes the author as a somebody in their field of endeavor. If you're field of endeavor is journalism of the newsy sort, and you want to spend all of your time updating your website, then establishing your own news outlet may be the way to go. But what most authors have to offer is their writing style, their knowledge and their unique way of combining the two, commonly refered to as their "voice". When an author with a unique voice gets stuck revisiting the same story or subject over and over again, that's called a "rut". Most authors I know outside of academia prefer not to get stuck in ruts, even if they can make a living at it. So getting up every morning and writing about the same subject every day just isn't an attractive proposition. Fortunately, it's not a good strategy for a website either.

The most popular pages on my website never change at all. I just did a quick check, and 23 out of the top 25 pages on my site, which account for over 40% of the daily visitors, have remained essentially unchanged since I posted them. These include book excerpts, essays, and some how-to guides. The only two pages in my top 25 draws that I do update on a regular basis are my self publishing blog, which is updated once a week, and my page about Amazon sales ranks, which is updated once or twice a year. I'll explain in more depth later about why these static pages draw more visitors than more dynamic content on author websites, but the short explanation is they succeed precisely because they remain the same, receiving only the occasional new coat of paint. Web pages are like real estate, value derives from location. Location on the Internet is defined by the links to your pages from other websites, and the neighborhoods those linking pages are in. The Internet search engines, particularly Google, give great weight to the real estate value of your website and individual pages, and are much more likely to send you visitors when your web page lives in a good neighborhood.

I've heard from aspiring authors who tell me they haven't bothered with a website yet because they don't have a book to sell. When they get a book published, they tell me, there will be plenty of time to build a website. But they have it backwards. You don't need a website in order to sell published books, there are plenty of bookstores willing to fill that function for you, including Amazon. Unpublished authors need a website to help sell their manuscript so it can get published, and then to help promote the book so the publisher will oblige them with royalty checks and new contract offers. A good portion of my book sales are generated by my website, especially for my self published books which I'm free to promote with large excerpts. But there are plenty of other ways to promote published books online that don't involve owning a website. If your goal is to self publish and sell books primarily through Amazon, then I would strongly recommend you read Aaron Shepard's "Aiming at Amazon" and if you want to promote your trade published book through social networking, the required text is Steve Weber's "Plug Your Book." While increasing book sales is a principal concern of this book, the main goal is platform building, and the website platform need not be tied to a single title or field of endeavor, as book promotion techniques are by definition.

The strategy behind building an author website is not about selling more books today, or next month. It's about having your own strategic marketing asset for years to come. Most professional authors lead a hand-to-mouth existence, living from advance to advance, always trying to line up the next book contract, and the one after that, even before they finish grinding out the title they're working on at the present. One of the original reasons I started writing commercial nonfiction back in the mid-90's was that I was looking for a way to make living while remaining independent. What I found was that working as a trade author is just like having a job, except there aren't any employee benefits. Sure, the hours are flexible - sometimes you get to work twelve or more of them a day! You don't have to drag into an office every morning, instead you get to have your work staring you in the face 24x7. And if you start turning down new jobs or looking to improve contract terms, they stop calling, because there's always a new batch of innocent new authors willing to take your place.

But most authors, if they want to keep writing for a living, have limited choices. They never create an independent platform so their main professional qualification as an author is the books they have in print. When those books disappear from the shelves, the authors become yesterday's news. A well conceived website platform doesn't have an expiration date. Unlike online stores and social networking sites which live in fear of the next big thing to come along and destroy their business model, websites based on content retain their value as long as the content remains relevant. When I first started posting my writing to the web in 1995, I was sure that there was a ticking clock on the window of opportunity, that within a couple years, every college student and entrepreneur with a little Internet savvy would be creating wonderful websites for everything under the sun. As the years went by and it didn't happen, I came to realize that most people spend their online time as consumers, not as creators. Google became one of the world's biggest companies not because they do great search, but because they figured out that human beings are always shopping!

More than a decade later, it's become clear that the incredible growth of Internet content is concentrated around entertainment and socializing. There are literally millions of people with professional skills, from auto mechanics to brain surgeons, who answer questions for complete strangers in online forums every day. And those forums are very popular websites, as long as the questions and the answers continue. But very few people invest months or years of their time writing a book that comprehensively addresses all of the questions they are happy to answer in forums. Writing a book or building a website requires a long term commitment, with no guarantee of reward. Unlike being a forum participant, where you can pick and choose the questions you want to respond to, creating a genuine resource takes the sort of commitment to research that most people won't make, unless somebody is paying them a salary. And that's the whole secret of why building an online platform today is no more difficult than it was a decade ago. There's not nearly as much competition as you'd think.