Archive for Wordpress
Author Websites
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Every author should have their own website – even if they haven’t published their first book yet!
Your website is your online business card, your most important marketing tool and your bookshop. Even if you sell your books on Amazon and not on your own site, your readers should be visiting your site prior to or after buying your book.
What are the main components of an author’s site?
Essentials:
- Bio - Your ‘about you’ is essential. Your readers want to connect with you, identify with you, feel like they know you, so share some information about yourself. Make sure you include at least one image of you – the ‘portrait of the author’ you use on your book/s or another shot.
- Book/s - A page specifically for your book (or books). You need to include an image of your book cover, the blurb for the book and information about where to buy the book – ideally a link to the online bookshop or your sales processing page. If you have a sales sheet, include this as a downloadable PDF as well.
- Contact - Include a contact form if you wish to accept direct contact through your site (to avoid spam don’t display your email address on the site). Include your agent’s contact info or your speaking agency as well as, or instead of, a contact form.
Optional:
- News / Events - Publish a calendar or listing of your past and upcoming book signings, speaking engagements, interviews, etc.
- Reviews / Testimonials - Publish reviews of your books, both professional and from your readers.
- Excerpts - Include an excerpt from your book, either published on the site directly or as a downloadable PDF, or provide both options.
- Speaking - If you are available for speaking engagements have a separate page for this. Include a link to your contact page for booking enquiries or info for contacting your speaking agency.
- Book Trailer – If you have a video book trailer for your latest book make sure you feature it prominently on your site. Book trailers for other books can be on a separate page but the latest book trailer should be on the home page.
- Blog - Some authors choose to blog, some don’t. Blogs can help your audience connect with you on a more personal level, keep them coming back to the site to read your fresh content, and enable them to interact directly with you via comments on your posts / articles.
Marketing tools:
- Social Media – If you are using social media marketing feature your chosen platform icons on the site so people can easily click on them and ‘connect’ with you.
- Sharing Tools – Tools like Add This or Retweet can be easily added to your site to encourage visitors to share your content.
- Newsletter Subscription – A sign-up form for a newsletter can help you build up a database list of people interested in your books. When you write your next book you already have a list of people interested in your topic or your style of writing that you can pre-sell your book to.
- Sell Sheet – A one page sales sheet is generally designed for book distributors, however, it can also be a great marketing tool.
- Media - A media kit can include the key information and files that a journalist could use to write an article on you or your book, or as background information for an interview. This could include: a sell sheet for your book, print quality portrait image and book cover image and an extract from your book in one easily downloadable zip file.
Other key points to remember
- Your site should be well laid out, with clear and easy navigation.
- It should be attractively designed with a modern look (no 80′s scrolling text, animated clipart gifs).
- You should be able to access and update your own website.
My recommendations
As a huge WordPress fan I am going to recommend using WordPress for your author site as you might have guessed. WordPress empowers authors (and everyone else too!) to manage their own website enabling them to update it, change it and add to it at any time, from anywhere you have internet access. Once you have the technical and design aspects out of the way it can be as easy as editing a Word document!
You don’t have to incorporate a blog into your site, your can use WorpPress to manage your website ‘pages’ only; or you can use blog posts as well; or you can easily start blogging later if you wish.
About the author
Jeannie Barker is a writer, web and graphic designer. Through her website www.jeanniebarker.com she offers a range of services including WordPress blog / website setup and customisation.
Where to start with a WordPress site?
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Everyone is telling you to get online, start promoting yourself, get into social media, write a blog, use WordPress, make a movie …
So where do you start?
Here’s a quick step-by-step process to getting yourself online now with WordPress.
1. Domain Name
Brainstorm potential names for your site. If you are already in business check the availability of a relevant domain name, if you are providing a service or are an author check if your own name is available.
Make sure you have plenty of ideas ready as your chosen domain name may not be available. If you want to get ‘yourname.com’ you may have to consider alternatives, like adding your middle initial.
TIPS: Don’t make your domain name too long or use words that are easily misspelled. Also consider how the words look together as a domain name not just individually.
2. Hosting
Since it’s your first site you can probably go for a cheap package not a full-on business package, unless you are planning on building a large site straight up and expecting to generate a lot of traffic.
TIPS: If finance is tight search for a hosting provider that allows monthly payments. If you intend to use WordPress (for a blog or to manage a website) find a host that includes an easy install process for WordPress.
3. WordPress Install
I recommend WordPress (the self-hosted version) for blogs and websites alike. It is an excellent Content Management System (CMS) which enables you to easily manage your own website and/or blog.
There are two version of WordPress and people often get confused by them. You can create your own blog site at www.wordpress.com for free and your site will be named www.yourname.wordpress.com. The benefits are that it is completely free, a great way to try out blogging and WordPress, and, you can even purchase an add-on to use your own domain name. On the downside you can’t have ads on your site and your theme choices are limited. This is great for a beginner or ‘hobby blogger’.
If you are planning to be a ‘pro blogger’ or wish to use WordPress as your website CMS I recommend purchasing hosting and installing WordPress (the version you can download from www.wordpress.org and install on your site or install via your control panel).
This version is also free, you just need to have your own hosting package. The benefits are that your content is all hosted on your own webspace, you can basically do anything you want with it since WordPress is incredibly customisable, you can place ads on your site and you can install any one of the thousands of themes available for WordPress.
4. Theme / Design
“Content is King!“ they say and it’s true. If you have nothing worth reading people won’t visit or stay long on your site, but it’s also true that some people will be immediately turned off by your website design.
No matter what your aim is with your website it needs to look professionally designed and the great thing about WordPress is that there are thousands of professional looking themes (designs) out there that you can apply to your site in seconds.
You can opt for one of the free themes or pay for a premium theme. Again, if funds are limited, take the freebie now and upgrade to a pro theme later if you wish.
The important thing to consider when looking at themes is not just the overall look but the functionality as well. If you want to display info or a menu on the left, the theme you choose must incorporate or allow this option.
TIP: Don’t get too bogged down looking for the perfect theme for your site at this stage. You can spend literally hours or even days checking out themes (I know, I have!). Pick something that looks OK for now and you can always change it later after you have the basics in place.
5. Plugins
WordPress is infinitely customisable. Plugins are fabulous (and fun too!)
You can use plugins for practical things like contact forms, and for fun things like the Cumulus animated tag cloud.
Search for plugins on the WordPress site or from the WordPress admin area > Plugins > Add New. Arrange where the plugins will be displayed on your site via > Appearance > Widgets
TIP: I suggest installing your theme before plugins because some themes include functionality that overlaps with plugins, eg. a theme may include a contact form so you won’t need to add one via a plugin.
6. Content
You can add your content now (or you may have chosen to do so prior to playing around with themes and plugins).
The key things to understand when you are adding content is the difference between Pages and Posts and how to use Categories and Tags.
Pages are generally used for static content, like the pages of a website. If you are using WordPress as CMS for your website and don’t want to include a blog section, use only pages. Note that pages can be designated as Parents (the default) and Children (hierarchical pages beneath the parent page). Parent pages will appear in your top level navigation and the hierarchical pages will appear below them.
Posts are generally used for the classic blog posts, journal style posts or an ongoing series of articles.
Categories are generally used as the broad topics of your blog posts. Categories help people find content on your site that is of interest to them, for example this article is in the Blogging category.
Tags are similar to categories and may also be used to find content of interest to your reader. Tags can be used like sub-topics or keywords in your posts. This post has been tagged with WordPress, hosting and social media.
TIP: Categories and tags can be used in different ways to organise your blog and make your content more searchable. There’s a great article on Categories vs. Tags over at UsabilityPost.com
7. Social Media
And now to promote your site and interact with your audience you need to ’get into’ social media!
“But it’s all so confusing” you say. Check out this list of social networks on Wikipedia – you will see there are a LOT and the list will continue to grow.
At this point in time it’s almost a given that you will be using Facebook and Twitter but they are not necessarily the right ones for you. You need to try to identify which networks your target audience is using and which ones you resonate with. Talk to your friends, family and associates and find out what their favourite social network is and why. Ask your clients what social networks they use. Check out the sites yourself and decide which ones resonate with you.
TIP: You don’t have to to do this right now. You can take time to concentrate on developing your site first and come back to social media later.
About the author
Jeannie Barker is a writer, web and graphic designer. Through her website www.jeanniebarker.com she offers a range of services including WordPress blog / website setup and customisation.
