Tag: website

Optimize Your Amazon Author Page

Posted on by Sue L Canfield

UPDATED 2023

Do you have an Amazon Author Page? Is it optimized? Sometimes I see books on Amazon where the author hasn’t yet set up an Author Page or it doesn’t have complete information. This free page allows authors, whether your book is in print, Kindle, or both, to update content on your book page, update your bio and descriptions, and view your sales data and customer reviews of your book.

If you already have an Amazon account, you’ll use that same log in information to set up an Author page. Here’s where you’ll set up that page on Amazon: https://author.amazon.com/

Have these items ready to create or update your Amazon Author Page:

  • Headshot
  • Bio—fill out your bio with as much information as possible, including keywords

Include links to your website and social media accounts in your bio so readers know where to connect with you and contact you. Remember to add a link to your author page on your website.

A great advantage to having your author page set up on Amazon is that readers can now click the Follow button on your Author page. Once they do that, they will be notified whenever your book is on sale or when you publish a new book.

2023 Update

In the Reports and Marketing tab you can now:

  • see how many people follow you on Amazon. (After you’ve reached 20 followers.)
  • make book recommendations: let people know where they should start with your books and what other authors’ books you recommend.

Outsourcing Your Book Marketing

Posted on by Sue L Canfield

Outsourcing your book marketing tasks can help you from feeling overwhelmed. Here are a few tasks you can outsource.image for outsourcing book marketing post

Newsletter

Hopefully you’ve already set up a way to capture emails on your website and have a list of people waiting to hear about your book launch. A virtual assistant can put together an email template, add your content, and make sure it gets sent out.

Social Media Content & Activity

Hire a social media professional to design images branded to match your book cover image. The professional can also make sure your social media presence is active on a regular basis. The professional can do this by retweeting and sharing content, scheduling posts, and following appropriate accounts. Be sure you take an active part also in social media, even if it’s just 10 minutes a day.

Website & Blog Posts

Hire a professional to create or polish up your website. A virtual assistant can use book excerpts to create and schedule blog posts for you.

Visual Assets

You want to be sure to have a stock of visual assets to include book cover images, your headshot, an inventory of visual images for social media and any ads you plan to run. Visual assets may include video for a book trailer and book promotion and a virtual assistant to edit and post them to YouTube.

Publicity

You will want to reach out to influencers, media, book reviewers, podcasters, and others about your book. These efforts can be managed by a publicist or marketing agency.

If you need any recommendations on who to outsource book marketing tasks to, I would be happy to see how I can help you or refer you to the right person.

Your Book Publicity Menu: Second Course, Mailing List

Posted on by Sue L Canfield
This entry is part 6 of 8 in the series Book Publicity Mini-Course

Now that you have a visually appealing website, it’s time to focus on the second course of your book publicity menu – your mailing list.

Email marketing does work, if done right. Adding an opt-in for your list on your website allows those who want to stay in touch and hear from you an easy way to do so. This second course needs to be ‘meaty’ and visually appealing.

Use an email tool like MailerLite or MailChimp and create a look for your emails to match your website. Be sure what you send out has substance and gives value to your reader. Its main focus should be to give something to the reader they find interesting – and a place to easily find your book to purchase it. However, don’t make every email a sales pitch.

Your Book Publicity Menu: First Course, Website

Posted on by Sue L Canfield
This entry is part 5 of 8 in the series Book Publicity Mini-Course

a plate of tartsGet ready to publicize your book. Just like you plan a dinner party menu very carefully and prepare the table and setting to appeal visually to your guests, you need to plan your book publicity menu and make it visually appealing.

The first course in your book publicity menu is your author website. When your audience hears about your book and wants to learn more about it they will search online. Your website should be the first place they land. So be sure you have a complete author website that is ‘tasty’ and appeals to your potential readers.

Your website has so much to offer. Your audience can contact you, join your newsletter list, buy your book, comment on your blog. The media can find your Media Room full of information you provide so they can reach out to you for publicity opportunities.

If you need help creating or updating your author website, or adding a Media Room page, contact us. We’re happy to help.

Custom Author Website for $300

Posted on by Joel D Canfield

We’re considering adding custom author websites to our offerings.

These would be extremely affordable but worth about ten times what they’ll cost. I have nearly 25 years of experience in web development so I work quickly and efficiently and I love doing this.

For $300 (three hundred dollars) one time cost you’ll get a custom made WordPress site with a blog and as many pages as you need. It will include all the content you provide, text and images, and will be designed to match your book (or whatever color scheme you provide.) Once the site is created you’ll get one round of edits, which includes virtually any changes you like to layout, colors, fonts, text.

There must be a catch, right?

Not really.

What’s not included is the domain name and hosting, which you’ll have to buy from our preferred hosting company Charlottezweb. Domains are $10 per year and hosting is $52 per year. We also provide managed hosting; we charge $25 per year for domains and $125 per year for hosting. Managed hosting means we keep your site backed up, updated, and generally trouble free. It does not include updates, which you can do yourself easily. If you already have a domain name we can use that.

To summarize: a unique, custom WordPress site and blog for $300 plus hosting costs.

I want to do this for one author to work out the kinks before I make this a general offering. Whoever says yes first gets it.

Some of My Work

I’ve done loads of websites over the past 20 years. I haven’t been promoting my web business so my most recent work has primarily been for our own businesses, but there are a few for clients here as well.

This site, of course.

My author site.

My author coaching website Someday Box.

My music site, tunehenge.

A site for our client, author Errol Barr.

Custom Massage Work, my massage therapist.