by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig
There has been a lot written about the importance of establishing an author platform. But what’s the best way to go about this without stretching ourselves too thin?
I have some ideas for getting started with an author platform (even before you publish your first book) over at the Insecure Writer’s Support Group. Hope you’ll pop over.
by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig
Recently, I went through and updated all of my individual book pages on my website… a very tedious process, but it was a rainy day and a worthwhile endeavor.
I’ve known for some time about Draft2Digital‘s Universal Links, but for some reason hadn’t put it to use on my website.
Sometimes I’ll get emails or messages on Facebook asking how to order one of my books on Apple iBookstore or Amazon…in another country. This means that I spend some time trying to locate it myself (even though I’m automatically redirected to the US site in many instances).
I especially want to get my individual book pages on my website right, because I link to the pages in each book’s back matter and on Facebook when I have a release. Plus, if you look up any of my book titles, my website usually comes in first for results (occasionally Amazon does).
One thing about Draft2Digital’s approach is that it’s one universal link and the reader is automatically directed to their home country’s retail site. Another is that you could simply use this one link instead of linking to all the stores (domestic and international) where your book is for sale. I know that my book is listed in at least twenty stores, counting all the retailers that my aggregators are distributing to. Some of these online stores go out of business, but if you click the ‘rescan’ button at D2D, it automatically repopulates and removes expired links. In fact, I recommend clicking ‘rescan’ a couple of times, anyway, to make sure all of the links are populated.
Even if you are a Kindle Unlimited (KU) author who exclusively distributes through Amazon, this is useful. As D2D explains: “But lest you think UBLs aren’t for you—as a KU author the advantage you get from using UBLs is globalization—which is a fancy way of saying that we’ll find your book in every Amazon marketplace, worldwide! So you can paste the URL from, say, your product page at Amazon.com, and Books2Read will find all instances of the book on Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk, and Amazon.everywhere-else-you-can-think-of! This allows readers to go to the Amazon store that matches their region, without the need to create a separate link.”
You don’t even have to be a Draft2Digital author to use the service. As they put it: “In fact, you don’t even have to be a Draft2Digital author to use it (though we’d really love to have you). All you have to do is visit Books2Read.com and paste your link to get started. If you want to edit your link, you can create a B2R account, or log in with an existing Draft2Digital account.”
For the UBL button on my website, I chose the text to read “international” since I had the US links and retailers listed on my page already.
Do you use UBLs? How do you help international readers find your books?
How to Help International Readers Find Your Book: Click To TweetPhoto on Visualhunt.com
by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig
I read a lot about the importance of book reviews to a book’s success. There are tons of articles out there about how to get more book reviews or how to find and contact book reviewers.
But sometimes I think writers don’t do enough with book reviews, when we have them. We allow them to sit statically on our Amazon book page.
I’m guilty of this, myself. But I’ve made more of an effort lately to highlight my reviews, recognizing the importance of social proof.
As I mentioned above, this is usually the repository of many of our reviews… at least, our customer reviews. Although the focus when I first got published was more on reviews in publications like Library Journal and Kirkus, the importance of customer reviews to potential readers has become increasingly important.
But that shouldn’t be the only place on the product page where our reviews are listed. A strategy that works for series is to add up all the 5-star or 4 and 5 star reviews and mention them under the ‘editorial review’ section on the page (we access that through our author central account). That way you end up with something like “readers love Winston Pepperjack! 500 5-star reviews.”
You can also create and format a list of your favorite reviews from other books in the series and list them on the editorial review page (Praise for the Winston Pepperjack series: ___ ).
This is something that I’m trying soon. I have all of my books listed in the back matter of each book (every book is linked to its own page on my website with ordering information for each retailer), but I don’t have any review snippets in the back matter at all.
If I include short reviews, I’m thinking it will help readers crossover from one series of mine to another. I do have some readers who are very loyal to a particular series and reluctant to try another. Reviews could help convince these readers to try something new.
This is something new for me, although I’ve seen others do this really well. Using a free design program like Canva or Visme, take part of a review and create an image with it. This creates a little visual interest for your website. I always feel like incorporating reviews on my site is a bit awkward, and the images help, I think.
I’m absolutely horrible at design, but even I was able to make a couple of serviceable images with the help of Canva.
We can also take the images we’ve created and include them in our newsletter with a link to the book in question. That could be a good, again, for reader discovery.
Some writers avoid their review sections at all costs. But there are ways of finding your most flattering customer reviews without having to trudge through the one-star, discouraging stuff. Just click on ‘5-star’ and Amazon will return the 5-star results.
What do you do with your book reviews?
Making the most of your reviews: Click To TweetPhoto on Visual hunt
by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig
Through the years, I’ve run across a lot of author websites. When I see something really useful, I’ll add it to my own. Here are five things that I’ve found worthwhile to add.
A book page for each book
This is important for SEO for your books. If you look up my books on Google, you get ‘rich results’ in the sidebar showing the cover, ratings, publication date, my name, etc. This wasn’t the case until I had a separate page on my site for each title (I also used some schema markup on book WordPress pages to help search engines read my page elements. More on how I did that here).
A coming soon page
A reader in suggested back in 2016 that I should create a ‘coming soon’ page on my site because she kept losing track of my releases and what series was launching a book next. I’ve made sure to keep it updated (which is, of course, the danger of having a page like that).
A nice link to add to the Coming Soon page (along with other pages on our site) is a link to our Amazon Author Central page with instructions to follow us there. I just put a simple: ” Follow me on Amazon for release updates” up.Continue reading
Although I wasn’t impressed by my first pre-order experiment, I’ve grown to accept pre-orders as a good way to make sure everything is in perfect order at the retailers on release day. I made changes in my pre-order strategy by including the pre-order on Amazon and by running the pre-order for a shorter period of time.
In December I ran a pre-order for a completely different reason: I wanted to delay a release until January, after the holiday busyness had settled down for readers. The book was finished by mid-December, so I decided to try to generate income while I waited for a better launch time.
Of course, I always second-guess myself. Would January really be better for sales than December? January is when everyone’s credit card bills come in. But then I reminded myself that December hasn’t been, for me, a good time to release. Fewer people are buying for themselves in December and they don’t have as much time to read. And I’d hardly be tempting new readers with the 12th book in a series.Continue reading
