Author Archive

Author websites are among the most accessible places for fans to celebrate an author’s work and for authors to captivate a reader’s ongoing interest. A website is a well-understood friend in some cases: familiar options for promoting a new book, for example, include sneak peeks to raise anticipation and a countdown to the big release day. How to fill the open stretches of road between projects is less obvious. Is reader interest simply elusive during the many miles of an author’s journey to a new work? Actually work you’ve already done can be key to avoiding a stagnant website. Bring your fans back for updates, giving you the best chance for their attention when you are ready to release a new work, by trying some of the following: 1. Include social media streams on your website Displaying the content of your social media updates, rather than just links to your streams, allows you to update your website with every new Instagram and Tweet. These small infusions of personality allow new visitors to connect beyond your publication information, and give existing followers the chance to catch something that was lost in their clogged feeds. A variety of plug-ins offer the ability to integrate your social media updates automatically into your website, so this means no extra work on a day-to-day basis. 2. Create discussion forums or dedicated fan space Remember all those notes and scenes that didn’t actually make it into your book? Use some of them to generate new fan discussions of your existing works on your website’s own fan forum page. Just offer topics, tidbits, or musings and let the fans respond in comments to you and to one another. Once you get it started, fans might take over and offer their own topics. Fan space will help readers… read more →