Search
× Search

Using Tech for Book Marketing

Kate Gingold from Sprocket WebsitesKate has been building websites with her husband Don since 1996 for all sorts of clients, including authors.

Kate regularly writes about online marketing for Sprocket Websites and provides tips and techniques for entrepreneurs and small-business owners. Since being an author today is not really different from being an entrepreneur with a small business, most of those tips are just as useful to authors.

Kate is an author herself. She writes books on local history, including the award-winning "Ruth by Lake and Prairie," a fictionalized account of the true story of Great Lake pioneering to the shores of Chicago and beyond to found Naperville, Illinois. 

Learn More about
Ruth By Lake and Prairie

Author Tips and Tales

You Don’t Need a Website…If You Don’t Want to Sell Books
Kate Gingold Host
/ Categories: Author Tips

You Don’t Need a Website…If You Don’t Want to Sell Books

When it’s so tough to squeeze writing and editing time into your already busy life, having to maintain a website, too, seems out of the question. Besides, there’s Amazon or the publisher. Let them handle the website stuff, you may think.

Well, you might want to think again. Here are some reasons why having your own website is so important:

Underscore Your Legitimacy

If a doctor handed you a scrap of notebook paper with her credentials written on it in crayon, would you let her operate on you? Of course not! When there are professional associations who evaluate doctors, a crayoned review hardly inspires confidence.

Having your own, up-to-date, website says that you are serious about your career as an author and intend to have readers take you seriously as well.

Provide Materials and Answers 24/7

Your website can also serve as a tool. Post a couple versions of your bio there, a short one and a longer one, for reporters, bloggers and event organizers to download. Information about your books with cover images can also be pre-written and made available. Whenever someone asks for a blurb, just send them the link. And don’t forget to have a contact page so interviewers can reach you.

You could also sell books from your site, but if don’t want to handle fulfillment yourself, you can link to the outside sales pages, emphasizing the ones that pay you the most.

Control Your Own Image

Amazon has its Author Central and Facebook has its About page, but you’re playing their game with their rules. On your own website, you can post whatever you want in whatever layout you want. No one will change the format on you without your permission or decide for you who gets to see it. It’s your game and your rules.

Interact with Your Readers

Social media certainly has a place in book marketing, but the format is intentionally transient. A website lets you provide richer content than social media platforms allow and lets you control the conversation better so you can build more meaningful relationships.

Build a Foundation

Over time, your website becomes a time capsule. In addition to promoting what events are coming up, you’ll have a list of the events you’ve already attended. You can also add photos and reviews of those events in blog posts, once again underlining the fact that you are a serious, in-demand author.

Because every page is about you and your books, your website will become the top result in search engines when someone googles you rather than that old news article with the truly horrible candid photo.

With a new book being uploaded on Amazon every five minutes, authors need all the help they can get to differentiate themselves. It doesn’t have to be complex or extensive, but as you can see, every writer should invest in a website and be the ruler of their own domain name.

Photo by Tara Winstead

Previous Article Your Book Marketing Plan
Next Article Should Authors Have a Facebook Profile or Page?
Print
926 Rate this article:
4.0
Please login or register to post comments.

Search in the Blogs

Archive

Authors Need Websites!

Do you need to get a domain name for your book or name?

Want a website to promote your books?

Get started now without blowing the budget at the SprocketStore.

Full disclosure:  Writing for Sprocket Websites is my day job, so if you have questions about digital marketing, I'm happy to help!

 

Marketing Author Interview

Following a presentation for In Print Professional Writers Group, Kate's husband (and publisher!) Don was interviewed by author Louise Brass for WBOM Radio. During the conversation, Don shared many of the marketing tips from his presentation. You can listen to it online here.

The Sprocket Report

The Sprocket Report is published every other week with Internet marketing tips, tools and techniques. The archive features articles from 2011 up to the present. You are welcome to read how business owners are using technology to market themselves and apply those tips to your author business.


 

 

Get a Book Siging Checklist and our Sprocket Report

Kate will be happy to send you her brief Book Signing Checklist. Treat your book promotion like a business - because it is!

AND, since much of your efforts will be online, she'll also enroll you in her Sprocket Report, an email newsletter sent every other Tuesday, that includes 2 Internet Marketing tips and a post from a guest blogger on related business.

No worries! She won't use your email address for anything else, and you can unsubscribe from the newsletter anytime, but the checklist is yours to keep.

Any questions of Kate? Leave them in the message field and she'll get back to you ASAP.

Your Contact Information

Your Feedback

Terms Of UsePrivacy StatementCopyright 2024 by Gnu Ventures Company
Back To Top