Well, I finally took the plunge. Every book marketing guide you'll find tells you that you have, have, HAVE to build a Web site to support your book. I've resisted doing so for a year now, because I'm not sure that I really see the point. After all, an Amazon page can carry all of the basic information and reviews, and if you do a good job adding content to that resource, what else does a reader need? And exactly how, by the way, is a reader likely to ever find your site, anyway, since the Amazon, B&N and other pages for your book will always out-rank it?
The obvious answer is that you have to continue to provide enough content at your book site to provide an incentive for people to keep visiting it. And that content has to be of sufficient value that they'll want to see the latest things you have to say. Having launched this site, I know how much work that can be - and I had the advantage of addressing a narrow, rather arcane topic, which made it easier to gain some visibility.
| But what the hey, part of what I set out to do in taking a dive into the self-publishing process was to learn and understand exactly what the reality of this new route to an audience is like. And the only real way to find that out is by doing. |
Have YOU Discovered the Alexandria Project? A Tale of Treachery and Technology |
| What I’ll be do with this new blog will be to adopt a more conversational tone, posting shorter entries more often. In other words, it will be more like blogs were when blogs first became popular, and before FaceBook diverted a large number of folks onto that new platform to share more day-by-day experiences. That will leave me free to maintain this blog on the same basis as always – posting longer, more in-depth, researched pieces on standards, open source, and other topics. I’ll also cross-post some of my author’s blog entries here as well, when they are of the longer, in depth type. But if you want to sample the daily flow and chronicling of the self-publishing world, and my own experiments in tackling it, you’ll want to visit by new blog, called Tales of Adversego as well. If you go there now, you’ll find a a number of entries there already to give you an idea what you can expect going forward. And like all WordPress sites, you can sign up for an email notifications of new entries. |
Available Now for $2.99 or less |
| You’ll also find other pages to the site as well, representing my ongoing experimentation with what I expect makes sense to include in an author site. So far, there’s just an About page, a Reviews page, and (of course) a Buy The Alexandria Project page. I’ll be continuing to tinker with these pages over time, and perhaps add new ones. What I don’t expect I’ll be adding are the type of gimmicks that I’m not convinced have any real value, such as a video trailer (something service providers would love to sell you for a signficant price). |
at Amazon, iTunes and Barnes & Noble (and in ePub and PDF formats at GooglePlay) |
But perhaps I’ll surprise myself, because I’ll also be visiting as many other author sites as well. And if I start seeing trailers that would appeal to me if I was trying to decide whether to buy a given book, well then, who knows.
In any case, if you have an interest in self-publishing, I hope you’ll join me at my new blog. If you want to give it a test drive, you see that the entry I posted this morning focuses on the topic of how hard to try to get reviews, and if so, of what types, and from whom. I hope to see you there.