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Let’s Address a Common Misunderstanding About Author Websites

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author websites

For nearly five years now, I’ve taught classes on how to build and optimize author websites. Every single class, here’s the most common question I receive:

Is it OK if I publish my book on my website?

This question gets expressed in a multitude of ways, such as:

  • What if I post full chapters of my book on my website (or blog)?
  • If I serialize my book on my website (or blog), is it considered published?
  • How can I charge a subscription fee for work I publish at my website?

My first answer is a very direct one: Sure, posting content you own at your website is OK. But why do it?

  • What do you gain by posting your book, in part or in its entirety, on your website?
  • How will anyone know it’s there?
  • Why will anyone want to read it on your website?

What are you trying to accomplish by putting it on your site and not publishing it through the biggest retailer of ebooks (Amazon)?

This question indicates a misunderstanding of what author websites are meant to accomplish—or at least the majority of them.

An author website is primarily a marketing tool, not a publishing and distribution tool.

The No. 1 reason to build an author website is to create a marketing and publicity hub for everything you do. It tells the story of you and your work. It’s a 24/7 business card that never stops working on your behalf. It offers official information about your books, offers a way for readers to stay in touch (such as through an email newsletter or links to social media), and provides a public face to the media and others who might wish to offer media coverage.

Some authors blog on their website, and in that case, yes, there’s a publishing function involved—but the blog is, at its heart, a marketing tool, part of your author platform and long-term business strategy.

There will always be success stories and inspiring case studies of authors who blogged their way to book deals, or who serialized their work on their own site, and somehow amassed a huge following. One such example is The Martian. But these are such outlying cases that they have no bearing on the fact that author websites aren’t ideal as a publishing and distribution platform for book-length work. They’re best at building your author brand and direct marketing to readers.

A much more effective way to build a readership is to publish and distribute your work where the readers are looking for their next best read—whether that’s Amazon, Wattpad, or some other platform for reading and writing where thousands of people gather. It’s quite difficult for fiction writers to turn their own site into a destination site—not impossible, but not within the existing skill set of most authors.  [Read more…]

Writing is Hard

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56206100_82c8a353f4_zIt doesn’t seem that hard at first.  When you’re caught up in the thrill of creating people and telling their story, writing feels like the easiest thing in the world. You just go on doing it until you get to the end.  Then you put that first work in a drawer for a month and look at it again.  It doesn’t look at all like the brilliant story you remember.  In fact, it sucks.

But you bear down, start reading about the craft of writing, and join a writer’s group, either online or in person (or both). You learn to spot your worst problems, follow the advice you get on fixing them, and fiddle with your manuscript until it is much, much better than when you started.

Then you collect 114 form-letter rejections.

If you’re not discouraged at this point, you park that first manuscript in a drawer for good and start the next one.  You’ve already learned a lot about writing from the first one, so this one is stronger from the outset.  Again, you revise it and have it critiqued and generally mess with it until it’s as good as you can get it.

This one does better.  It still gets a stack of form rejections, but some of them are slightly personalized, and two agents ask for first chapter and synopsis. So you have tantalizing, month-long waits before . . . rejection.

It’s usually at this point that you lose focus.  You might obsess about your technique, as if there were a particular subtlety to writing that you’re not seeing.  So you build a library of writing books, read everything you can on the internet, and analyze bestselling authors to the point that pleasure reading becomes work.  Eventually, you can rattle off the fourteen different ways to build micro-tension and list the eleven flavors of third-person point of view.

This all might even help.  But more likely than not, while you’re refining your technical skills until you can construct a story that’s as precise as a Swiss watch, you’ll lose track of the reasons you were writing the story in the first place.  I help people develop their storytelling skills for a living, so I know the value of studying the mechanics of writing.  But I also know the limits.  Careful study, and even great editing, can only make you competent.  It takes something else to become brilliant.

[Read more…]

In Praise of Paper Books

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spectatorflyleafI recently started rereading a book I bought many years ago – one volume of an eight volume collected set of The Spectator, a London daily periodical from the early 18th century.  William Addison and Joseph Steele wrote most of the The Spectator’s 2500-word, witty and wise essays on serious topics of social value.  A typical piece warns against the dangers of using “party lying” (i.e. propaganda) to advance a political cause.  Another is an extended meditation on eternity.  Several offer a serialized, detailed review of Milton’s works.

This may sound like somewhat hard going, but The Spectator is nothing if not eclectic.  It includes comic short stories involving a good-natured but dim country squire named Roger de Coverley.  You can find parody advertisements a quarter millennium before Saturday Night Live — for an elocution school for parrots or a dentist who offered to extract teeth from masquerade goers without removing their masks.  And in one memorable exchange of letters, a prim young woman named Matilda Mohair wrote to condemn the unseemly practice of young men pushing women on swings as an excuse to catch a glimpse of their legs.  Within a week, four other correspondents wrote, claiming to know Matilda and saying she was only objecting because she had crooked legs.  One even said she was with child “despite her crooked legs.”  It’s an exchange I could easily see happening on Twitter.

The Spectator was wildly popular in its time, with an estimated daily readership, in London’s fashionable coffeehouses and salons, of nearly 20,000 at a time when books were typically printed in lots of 500.  Even before the daily issues stopped running, publishers were collecting the essays into an eight-volume set that was reprinted every few years for more than a century.  It only began to fall out of favor in the late 19th century.

My volume is part of a small (duodecimo) leather-bound, illustrated set from the 1767 London printing.  Because The Spectator was so popular, you can still find individual eighteenth-century volumes in good condition for about the cost of a modern hardback.  This particular volume played a role in my own life.  When my wife and I were courting, I used to read the essays aloud to her.  She particularly liked one that explored the value of a garden — the essayist suggests using evergreens to create a winter garden and recommends using plants native to the area, “such as rejoice in the soil.” (By the way, reading your favorite works aloud is not a bad way to find a soulmate.)

The thing that delights me most about this particular book, though, is the inscriptions written in the flyleaf by the book’s previous owners. [Read more…]

Beyond Dickens: Trends and Tech in Serial Fiction

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By Thomas Hawk / via Flickr
By Thomas Hawk / via Flickr

Note from Jane: This piece first appeared in the January 2014 issue of Scratch, a digital magazine about writing and money. I am delighted to run it here at Writer Unboxed, where it can be publicly discussed and shared.

Two commenters on this post were randomly selected to receive a free annual subscription to Scratch, starting with the first issue. They are Felipe Adan Lerma and Marcy McKay. Congratulations!

In September 2011, I received an e-mail from Sean Platt, who requested a meeting to ask for publishing advice. I had never heard of him, but he had significant experience in online marketing and copywriting, and I agreed to meet with him.

At Coffee Emporium in downtown Cincinnati, Platt showed me his unpublished children’s verse, which he was passionate about, but had a low chance of commercial success. Then he outlined a highly strategic plan to self-publish a continuing story in episodes and seasons, like a TV show, that would build suspense with a fast-paced thriller plot and cliffhangers at the end of every “episode.”

What he was describing was a serial. At the time, serials were most often found on the edges of the traditional book publishing industry, at fan-fiction sites and other niche communities. They were also primarily written and given away for free. I advised him on what I knew about self-publishing, but the serial aspect I privately had doubts about.

However, Platt struck me as a high-energy, creative person who was going to do well with or without my advice. He had all the qualities of a shrewd entrepreneur, which later resulted in me inviting him to guest lecture at my university classes. The students hung on his every word because he spoke with enthusiasm and without bullshit.

Inspired by his project, I researched and wrote a piece on serial fiction for Publishing Perspectives in December 2011. Platt’s project, which had launched by that time, was mentioned, along with a few start-ups and the over-reliance of publishing types on the example of Charles Dickens as the ideal serial author.

[pullquote] What first struck me as a fringe activity in 2011 is starting to look more like a potential driver of author discoverability, as well as how we consume stories. [/pullquote]

Since that article (and certainly since the Victorian era!), a lot has happened. Amazon has gotten into the game, and new services like Wattpad are affecting on how writers and readers interact, with participation from mainstream and niche authors alike. What first struck me as a fringe activity in 2011 is starting to look more like a potential driver of author discoverability, as well as how we consume stories. It’s time to take a fresh look at the form of serials: what’s happening with the trend, how authors are using serial publishing services, and why it matters to the future of publishing.

What’s a Serial?

[Read more…]

‘Wins’ Without Losses: Agreeable Disagreement

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Porter - Provocations in Publishing logo header WU
Provocations graphic by Liam Walsh

Five Quite Recent Provocations

Provocation One: Man Booker Irrational?

When the American novelist Lydia Davis was given the £60,000 Man Booker International this week in London, the prize administration rushed to its site to quote one of her short works:

“I was recently denied a writing prize because they said I was lazy.”

Writer Unboxed, Porter Anderson, Provocations in Publishing, books, ebooks, authors, literary, literature
Lydia Davis

“Well not anymore!” chortled the site’s folks in what might be the most charming, personable home-page announcement seen on a big-prize site.

But by Friday, Dennis Abrams was reporting at Publishing Perspectives that a blogger was asking, Is The Man Booker International Prize Not International Enough? This was the third consecutive International Man Booker (of five total) to go to a North American, after all. And four of the five had gone to English-writing authors.

 

Provocation Two: Are Amazon’s Fans Fictional?

When Amazon Publishing announced its ingenious everyone-gets-paid plan to publish fan fiction through its new Kindle Worlds program, one reader quickly got to me on Twitter to say:

“I’m offended. There are real authors out there with fresh voices. This is a slap in the face to them.”

Writer Unboxed, Porter Anderson, Provocations in Publishing, books, ebooks, authors, literary, literatureSome of publishing’s oldest guard, who normally can utter nothing good about Seattle—don’t even mention Tacoma—were quietly calling Amazon’s program “brilliant.” And yet I was simultaneously in an exchange with this author who earnestly felt that Kindle Worlds somehow gave fan-fiction writers an unfair advantage over original writers.

 

Provocation Three: A Patchett Job

When one of the best-loved authors among us, Ann Patchett, said to The Bookseller in London that “authors have been protected for a long time, we are very well cared for” and “we need to think about our other partners, from bookshops to publishing and self-publishing,” you’d think Pope Francis had opened fire on a family of doves.

Writer Unboxed, Porter Anderson, Provocations in Publishing, books, ebooks, authors, literary, literature
Ann Patchett

Never mind that she was doing an interview in support of the UK’s upcoming Independent Booksellers Week. No, here is the headline on one blog post: Ann Patchett Doesn’t Know Shit About Publishing. And that post sends you to this one: 

Passive Guy has just about decided that the differences between indie publishing and traditional publishing are so great that nearly anyone immersed in traditional publishing has almost nothing useful to say about indie publishing.

 

[Read more…]

 

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