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 →
Everyone knows to “use” social trying to cover all the bases. So where do you begin as an author or small publisher looking to make your mark in a clustered book world? Know what they’re good for. Each platform serves a useful and largely individual purpose in terms of promotion and engaging people with what you do. Here’s a brief, basic run through of some: Twitter: Bitesize updates, good for socialising and interacting directly with people. Facebook: Good for slightly longer statuses and more concentrated discussion. Instagram: Visual. Got a book? Post it in well-crafted pictures. Got a dog? Definitely post pictures of them. Youtube: For videos. Regularity can work well here: weekly, fornightly, monthly updates. With vloggers, you need to make sure these are of a fairly high quality to compete. Blog: WordPress, Blogspot or your website are all great places to write longform pieces about topics that are relevant to or interest you, if you’re going for straight up blogging. Or… Tumblr: Can be used for blogging but also a GIF-kingdom. Full of fandoms, and offers a little more freedom than other blogging platforms, and a readymade community. Pinterest: Where you ‘pin’ images, links and more that you like in collections for people to view and pin again. Perfect for moodboards. Linkedin: CV. It’s good for professional networking and snooping people who work for companies that you’re looking to perhaps get in touch with. Snapchat: Temporary photos and videos sent to followers’ phones. Create stories. Periscope: Live streaming, can be integrated into other platforms like Twitter easily. Reddit: A massive community that covers anything and everything. You share things and comment, upvote and downvote. You need to get to grips with subreddits, though we’d assume you’re looking for /r/write. Emails: It’s often forgotten, but setting up a mailing… read more →