Fresh Ideas…

One thing I’m learning in this new era of book writing/publishing/selling is that we either all hang together or we’ll hang separately (to quote a famous founding father). As the middle men, um, people, for WordServe clients, Rachelle and I often hear great ideas from clients that we want to pass along. Marcus Brotherton has done a fabulous job of promoting his books on the web “on a dime.” He’s figured out some things that he was happy to share with the WordServe family of authors.

Here’s a nice piece from Marcus that you may want to print out and work through…

Happy on-line marketing,

Greg


Website Design for Books—
the George Costanza Way

by Marcus Brotherton

When it comes to designing websites for my books, every decision I’ve ever made in my entire life has been wrong.

My only success has come when I took a lesson from Seinfeld sidekick George Costanza, who came to the epiphany one day that if every instinct he had ever had was wrong, then doing the opposite of that would have to be right.

In George’s case, instead of ordering tuna and toast at the diner like he always did, he started by ordering chicken salad on rye, untoasted, with a side of potato salad. Then instead of trying to get dates by lying and saying he was an architect, his opening line became, “Hi I’m George. I’m bald, unemployed and live with my parents.”

And—that worked!

With website design, I began the process several years ago with all the bells and whistles. A production company designed my first book website which had a flash opening with all the gewgaws. Things looked impressive. But production companies don’t come cheap, and changing the site was so complicated code-wise that I couldn’t figure out how to update it on my own. For me, this wasn’t a long term solution.

My second attempt wasn’t any better. A few years back I wrote a house-backed series for teens called FlipSwitch (Multnomah Books). Everything in that project needed to be huge. By contract, I’m not allowed to disclose how much the website’s URL purchase price was, (Multnomah picked up the tab for that) but let’s just say that I once bought a Honda CRX for the exact same amount.

Then, halfway through the project, everything busted loose. Random House bought Multnomah, FlipSwitch fell through the cracks, and I was out on my ear. I still needed a huge website to promote the books, so I coerced a web-savvy friend to design my site for free, but in exchange I had to sit on a board for a non-profit organization he was championing. Three years later the FlipSwitch book project had garnered impressive awards and sold a total of eleven copies. Random House closed my website (because they owned the URL), and I’m still sitting on my friend’s board.

Thankfully, book projects continued for me, and I still needed to create websites for them. What was I to do? I wanted to inform my readers about the books. I also wanted to be able to update the sites anytime I wanted. I also (as I was a full-time collaborative writer by then and broke) didn’t want to spend much cash. Nothing else I had tried had worked so far.

Enter the book website crafted from a blog. Not only are these sites easy to create, but two of them have actually turned a profit (and the third is newly up and running, soon expected to generate some cash). These sites haven’t made millions, mind you, but the Amazon click-throughs on them have paid for whatever I’ve previously spent on the websites that made nothing. My conclusion is that if you want to create an informative, easy, and cheap website, this is the way to go.

If you can see what these look like, I’ve currently got three of these Costanza-styled websites up and running.

→ A bio site at http://www.marcusbrotherton.com/. This is mostly for publishers and authors needing collaborators. It’s basically a résumé on-line.

→ A book site for a collaborative military non-fiction project I worked on at http://www.callofdutythebook.blogspot.com/.

→ And a site for an upcoming book at: http://www.bandofbrothersbooks.com/.

If your main criteria for creating a website is for it to be informative, simple to update, and inexpensive, you can build the same thing for your book.

Here’s how:

1. Go to http://www.blogger.com/ and create your free blog. It’s easy and it only takes a few minutes to set up your site, name your blog, and select your URL.

With blogger, all URLs end with “blogspot.com” and my recommendation with the first part of your URL is to be as simple, direct, and memorable as you can. My mistake with Lt. Buck Compton’s book was to go informative and name it “Call of Duty the Book at blogspot dot com,” which is quite a mouthful if you say it out loud. If I had to do that one over again, I’d name it something more direct such as “Buck’s book at blogspot dot com,” or even simply “Buck at blogspot dot com.”

2. Once your blogger site is set up, you’ll need to create a template from the ones that blogger provides. If you want to host Amazon links on the side, you’ll need a template that has side columns. I chose the template called “Rounders.3” for all of my sites, and then went and changed the colors later on so each site would look different. (If you want to later be able to customize your blog with free backgrounds you can download from the Internet, use the Minima template.)

That’s about all it takes to get your website up and running. You can now add your information to it as posts and customize how your site looks. The best advice here is just get on it and start to play around, experimenting with how things look and how your wording sounds.

If you want a URL different than “blogspot,” that can be done, too, but it will cost you a small bit of money and it’s a bit more complicated. There are a variety of ways it can be done, but the easiest way I’ve found is to go to a domain purchasing site like www.GoDaddy.com and buy your URL.

I own two of my URLS: http://www.marcusbrotherton.com/ and http://www.bandofbrothersbooks.com/. Since nobody owned either of these beforehand, I was able to get them both very cheaply. They each cost me about $10 a year. Just follow the steps on the GoDaddy site to purchase a new URL.

Then, to have my new URL show up on the blogspot site, I had GoDaddy “forward” the new URL over to the blogspot site and then mask the blogspot URL.

To do this yourself, go to the “Domain” button, select your domain name and you’ll see the function that guides you through it set up there. It might look straightforward, but I couldn’t figure it out, so I just phoned up GoDaddy and explained to them what I wanted to do. They were very helpful in walking me through it. When you don’t know something, just call and ask—that’s become my motto.

To place a link on your site to your book’s listing on Amazon, you’ll need to join the Amazon Associates program. Go to www.affiliate-program.amazon.com and sign up for your account there. This step takes a while to do as you need to follow a number of steps including telling them how you want to get paid. I get paid by direct deposit, which means you need to know your bank’s routing number. All that took was a simple phone call to my bank and they were happy to tell me all I needed to know.

The Amazon Associates program website is quite straightforward, and will walk you through everything you need to know about placing a click-through link on your site. Once you get the code information for your book from Amazon Associates, go back to your blogger site, go to the “Layout” button, and look to the right where it says “Add a Gadget.” Click on that button and scroll down to where it says “HTML/Java Script.” That’s where you’ll paste the code you got from the Amazon Associates site.

You can also create “widgets” from the Amazon Associates site, everything from video links to revolving displays of several books, which is what I have on the www.bandofbrothersbooks.com site. Again, just go to the Amazon Associates site, play around and experiment.

It never hurts to submit your URL to Google so search engines find it. Go to http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl and follow the directions there.

So that’s it. Website for your book, done. Start to finish, maybe two days tops. Maybe less.

How do you publicize your book blogsite? That’s always the big question, and new ideas emerge all the time. I’m not a blogger, per se, even though my sites are on blogs, so I don’t post new information with any amount of regularity other than quarterly. I probably should, but then again, I’m doing this the Costanza way.

What I have done is gone to existing online forums around subjects near to whatever book I’m working on, and posted comments there, with links back to my sites. That’s worked pretty well, and word seems to get out around.

I’ve also had a few URLs printed in the back of books I’ve worked on. This seems counter-intuitive—to have people buy your book and then go to your website—but, in practice, things seem to flow both ways there. People read your book and then want to find out who you are, that type of thing. It’s also handy if you’re offering several books for sale on your site.

This is the end. Happy website creation, and enjoy the chicken salad on rye.

Marcus Brotherton is a collaborative writer, the author or co-author of 19 books.

Greg here:

We’d welcome the chance to hear YOUR good ideas, as well.

Are you downloading out of print books on Kindle? Can you send us a step by step guide?

How do you get higher Google rankings so your book/website comes up on page one?

How do you promote your books locally? Newspaper, radio, bookstores…what have you done that has been successful?

These types of ideas, and more, will be golden as we all try to weather the economy with a business and writing career intact. Share them with Rachelle or me and we will edit and post on future blog updates.