You want to sell your book. To do that, you need traffic that leads directly to your Amazon or B & N or other salespage. How will you get that? One way is if the tags you chose for your book are just so strong that search engine traffic will lead directly to your book's listing.
Or, you could go to all sorts of places on the internet and promote your book. Or you could try to get sale from people who visist your own website.
Is having our own website important? What sort of site should it be?
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John, beware of monopolies! It's good that more than one entity provides this service and there is still some competition left.
Great point, Aya.
So far, I think there is still healthy competition between Amazon, B&N, and a few other big players. As long as the little person can still publish their own work, using the most cost-effective means, and there are no gatekeepers who protect the monopoly from outside players, I think we'll be okay.
There is a lot of healthy jostling going on among technology platforms. Kobo, as noted elsewhere, is just positioning itself independently after losing its Borders conduit.
I was just the other day reading an ad from Publishers Weekly, in which they promote their Select program in tandem with Vook, a publishing platform that charges a healthy amount of money to do what a canny self-pub can do for him or herself. The interesting thing, and why I mention it, is because it sounds like they are basically offering for several hundred (or more?) dollars the exact same service that Fictionwise has offered for over 10 years, and which Smashwords has now been offering for about 3 years. They take your input file (an RTF with Fictionwise, a DOC with Smashwords) and convert it to 8+ output formats heading to all the major platforms.
The unsuspecting author, not knowing about the wheel that's already invented, and is virtually free to use, may pay hundreds of dollars to get the same thing.
If you think "Oh well, it's PW -- they probably provide editing services..." Not so. They state that you provide them a camera-ready or 'finished' file. Garbage in, garbage out.
Trust me on one thing. I have sat and formatted, reformatted, and re-re-formatted dozens of titles for multiple authors into various formats...and hated the whole thing. From my perspective, one stop shopping is ideal. But as you say, if it ever becomes the only game in town again, like the Big Six, then we're all in trouble. A few people will make a lot of money, and most people will be left mowing lawns and raking leaves for a living.
Then too, there is this fundamental confusion about terminology. As I always like to point out, 'capitalism' and 'free enterprise' are 180 degree opposites. This is a point many people are confused about. See Teddy Roosevelt and the Big Stick. Monopoly capitalism kills off competition and gathers all power and wealth into fewer and fewer hands, until theoretically there is one monolith or cartel left (the Big Six in NY, and the entire closed system industry they have been implicit in for 40 years). Free enterprise means many smaller companies competing in a free and open market place -- hopefully, the New Publishing will continue along this path, though natural market forces will kill off many players while positioning a few in the direction of monopoly capitalism. As long as authors and readers are enabled to bypass these huge clots, and continue trading money for text efficiently and cheaply, we're not in danger of one player owning the market place again, as the Monolith did for 40 years.
The obvious footnote 1 is: Beware of Amazon, while enjoying the many good innovations they have brought for authors and readers versus the Big Six exclusion/monopoly model.
Footnote 2: it would be naive to think that other huge players wouldn't like to do the same thing that people fear about Amazon.
I dont think so. if people can be bothered to visit your website then they can find and buy your book
Don't make the consumer do the work to find you.
You mean, don't make him Google his topic of interest?
Nigel, that's a good point.
ayakatz.com is available. I just checked.
That would be true if our personal websites had any traffic of their own to speak of. I have a homepage, and two websites, but I still find that backlinks from shared sites drive traffic better than onsite SEO and social networking.
Aya, you don't have ayakatz.com, but it's available.
I did a Google on "Aya Katz" and got someone's website with your page as a plain gray subset on which there is a picture so dark I can't see who it is, plus a title line that says
"I'm a linguist who does ape language research." It does not say "I am an author" which I assume would be your message. I mean the ape research is a wonderful, unique calling card to bring attention to yourself.
But *ya gotta tell people what you want them to know.* Don't beat around the bush. Go for the throat. "I am an author--read my books. You like apes? I can give you apes..."
BAAA-WWWOOOOO-HAAAWWW!!! OOK! OOK! EEK! EEK! AWK! AWK!
I have a good friend who is a professional archeologist--her novels are relevant to that field, and she is getting attention from academics (and I think soon the public) for her rousing thrillers (Deborah Cannon, the Raven Series of archeology thrillers).
You can use your professional accomplishments and bio to set yourself apart from the other 211,000+ authors and books (2011 statistics from BEA and other sources).
I suggest you have a website of your own, ayakatz.com, that declares up front "I am an author" etc.
But you can blog here at WAENetwork or in a million other venues and then tweet about it or post to FB, That doesn't explain why you need your own website.
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