Website Design and Management Blog

Every author's dream is to have a literary agent who will quickly get back with you to sign a wonderful, all-inclusive contract with a major publisher who is thrilled at the opportunity to handle your book.  Wouldn't that be great?

Unfortunately, this dream happens to only a relative handful (compared to the total number of new books coming out) of author's each year.  Far more authors embark upon the challenging task of self-publishing.  Although it can be satisfying and rewarding, it can be difficult to know where to start in marketing your book.  There are definitely some authors who succeed at generating book sales and who make money off their books.

Here are 9 quick tips for authors who want to promote their self-published books:

1. If your book interior typography is not at a professional level and you do not have an attractive cover design, you will not get any placements in bookstores, either through chains or independents, unless you are good friends with the store manager.
2. The absolute best marketing website for self-published authors is http://www.bookmarket.com. Buy John Kremer’s book and study it.
3. Social media and blogs can be effective marketing tools, but only if the author is an active, honest participant in discussions rather than just promoting the book.
4. A book website is a good idea, but competition for keyword placement in search engines for book websites is incredibly fierce.  Only a sustained campaign of search engine optimization, blog posts, search for reciprocal inbound links on related sites, active social media linkbacks and long-tail keyword optimization will give you any traffic on the site.
5. Kindle books are outselling soft cover books.  Get your books converted to Kindle editions and setup an amazon.com account for them.
6. Createspace (amazon.com) is great for authors who don’t know where else to get their books formatted, get a cover design, or have it printed other than by using a service.  But it can be expensive and will not necessarily generate hoped-for sales.  Another option is to look at Lightning Source.  They are print-on-demand only, but offer most of the same distribution opportunities as Createspace.  LSI is owned by Ingram Books.  If a distribution option is selected, the book will be included in the Ingram Book Catalog and can be ordered through book stores using the online catalog.
7. The best selling self-published books succeed because the author has made a conscious, solid, time-consuming effort to sell books without trying to attach an hourly amount to their personal time spent in promoting the book.
8. Non-fiction self-published books are far easier to sell than fiction, especially if they are written by subject matter experts and used as back-of-room sales for workshops and seminars.
9. Successful self-published authors are not afraid of “shameless self-promotion.”

These are just some basics.  If you want to travel the self-publishing road, be aware that it is difficult and requires persistence and committment.  Good luck!

One of the most important factors in getting good placement for your website in keyword searches is to make it easy for the search engine robots to discover your site's purpose.  The content (text) on your webpage is weighted heavily in determining what the robots will report about what your site should be indexed for, especially the first sentence or paragraph on the page.

Let's take a simplistic, imaginary situation where ABC Company manufactures widgets made from stainless steel that are critical parts for a certain type of industrial roller.  Although there are many types of "widgets," the typical ABC Company customer is looking specifically for stainless steel widgets.  Frequently the person writing the page text will want to lead off the website content with something that is so general that robots can't glean meaningful information from it.  Like this:

"Our company prides itself on setting the highest standards in the industry for our top quality parts for rollers."

What is a robot going to report about this text?  Probably the most useful phrase is "parts for rollers," but this doesn't help the company in it's quest for high ranking for the searches mentioned above.  However, if the first sentence is:

"Stainless steel widgets manufactured by ABC Company are precision engineered for use in gizmo rollers."

Then the sentence contains the type of widget, the company name and the type of roller, all of which may be helpful in being found for searches on these terms.

In our imaginary example, this sentence is just the tip of the iceberg in trying to get good placement for keyword rich content.  The keywords typically need to be used several times in grammatically correct, contextually accurate following sentences without "stuffing" the keyword on the page (which is a definite no-no).  This creates a keyword density on the page that is helpful to robots in condensing your text down to the most meaningful aspect of your web page.

To illustrate the fact that this example is an over-simplification, here is what Google says about it's methodology;

"Today we use more than 200 signals, including PageRank, to order websites, and we update these algorithms on a weekly basis.”

But writing good, keyword-rich content is without question one of the most important and valid ways to let the search engines know what your site is about.  Getting that message across is the first key step to getting good placement for your desired keywords.