Marketing

Once your website is up and running, the next step is to control how your site is presented in two key areas:

• search results (such as Google and Bing), and
• social network sites (such as Facebook and Google+).

In both areas, you can control how your site is presented on these external web locations. By presenting your message you can ensure that the correct details about you and your books are shown in search results and social network posts so that you maximize visits to your website/interest in your books.

How Strangers Find You

As an author, you will always be looking to find new readers—these new readers, by definition, will be strangers to you. Often, perhaps usually, you don't find readers, but instead, they find you. There are two important ways that readers find authors that are unknown to them:

An author's website is usually the hub of their presence on the web.

Any website will always be a work-in-progress, constantly evolving and never finished. Once they are "good enough" they go live (and often they go live when they are still in need of a bit of work). This is quite reasonable: an author's career never stands still and what an author wants from their website will keep changing, with each change incrementally improving.

Different authors will have different aims and will want to stamp their individual personality on their own website. As with writing a book, there is no empirical measure of the "right" or the "wrong" way with a website. Designing a website is all about making choices—there are no wrong choices, but there are definitely some things an author can do which will not support the author's aims.

The area where author websites fall down is not the content, but the implementation. Many try to be too clever, or get obsessed by looks, or let their designers run wild. This note looks at what authors should do, and also considers some of the practices that should be avoided.

Viral marketing is one of those poorly defined notions that is often misunderstood.  For the sake of clarity in this article, I am using the term viral marketing to encompass the notion of spreading a message by word-of-mouth (in the many forms that word-of-mouth can take).

Viral marketing is a hugely powerful tool and one that every author should be aware of, if for no other reason that other people (those doing the word-of-mouth thing) are doing your marketing for you.  However, it is marketing, not selling—you still need to do something to ensure that any interest generated from viral marketing is converted into sales.

If you are going to be commercially successful as an author—in other words, if you are going to generate sufficient income to support your chosen lifestyle—then you need to sell books. That should not be news...

So what is the best way to sell your current book? Simple... publish a new one.

Now that may sound a bit flippant, so let me elaborate, but before we look at the Sawtooth Tail, let’s look at how we got to where we are.