Build Your Author Platform. Carole Jelen

Plan Your Author Website Strategy

      The time you spend now in setting up your site will influence and reward every segment of your author platform. Your optimum author strategy is to identify your unique, consistent, identifiable author brand. Create and present your brand and lead your audience to visit your site, where they can subscribe to your newsletter, follow your publications, favorably review your books, return for more and tell their friends, and, most importantly, buy your books.

      So now take a deep breath, carve out a little time, relax, and give some deep thought to who you are as an author. Ask your friends and associates for words that describe you and then pick out the best ones. What value do you offer to your audience? Who are your readers? What are their terms and their vocabulary? When you start to record your planning into a workbook, you’ll begin to see the component parts emerge into your author brand. Summarize your unique value addition to an audience you understand well. The solid definition of your author brand identity will help you coordinate your content on your site and will reverberate to all parts of your author presence and presentations. Don’t allow your author presence to become a collection of online fragments! Follow these steps to plan your home central author website.

Define Your Audience

      Before you can reach any audience or motivate anyone to buy your book, it’s imperative to understand what your audience likes, enjoys, and, above all, what they need. A surprisingly common mistake many authors make when trying to pitch to me as an agent, or when pitching to a publisher directly, is not really knowing or understanding who they’re writing for! Every publisher’s book proposal form requires a thorough audience definition by priority, starting with primary audience definition, then secondary and even tertiary group categories. It helps to further detail each segment by creating “personas,” that is, embody each audience segment in a single person whose characteristics you can pinpoint.

      At the very minimum, start with a basic definition of your audience first and foremost:

       Who are the primary, secondary, and tertiary audiences of your book?

       What are the problems and concerns of each?

       What is your audience’s point of view?

       Embody your audience in one “persona” for each segment of readers.

      

      It’s simply easier to define and understand an audience segment through a single reader or customer who you already communicate or work with. Define what draws that person into your community of readers. The more details you can add, the better you will be able to speak directly to your readers to create an audience-centric experience that leads to author platform success. If you don’t already understand your audience in depth, a quick way to find out is by interacting with your audience through blog comment areas. You can also check out the blogs of others who write for your audience; read those comments for valuable insight about where they are coming from. Some best-selling authors like Ann Rule even complete manuscripts dictated by audience ideas and reactions, gathered from blog comments, polls, or direct emails. The bottom line is that the more you understand your readers, the more enabled you are to talk with them. Direct communication is a path to building an audience that returns to your author website, social media profiles, and every other aspect of your author platform.

Plan Your Website Self-Introduction

      So take time to think through who you are as an author and why your experience is of value to your readers, and then write out this description as a guideline for how you present your author brand.

       Develop your own brand tagline. Keep it short and memorable. For example, my tagline at Jelen Publishing is “Hi, I’m Carole Jelen, Literary Agent/Author, Publishing Veteran.” Why? Because this is what authors have told me that they are most interested in.

       Choose a welcoming author photo that you use consistently for recognition (more on these elements later). The photo counts because it’s the first impression you leave for readers to “meet” you. It’s a good idea to get second opinions on which photo to use from people whose opinions you trust.

       Keep your online and live persona cohesive so your audience will be able to identify you, recognize you, and then connect with you from multiple locations. Authors who reach out a friendly hand to introduce themselves front and center have the highest chance of connecting with their audience quickly and successfully. Introducing yourself online, much like introducing yourself in person, leads to more interest in you. The online click that brings a browser to meeting you on the page is a first step leading to a first impression that grows into a lasting relationship.

Plan Your Site Landing Page to Keep Your Audience

      Over half of us leave websites within seconds of getting there! We’ve become skimmers on the Internet, sifting through massive amounts of information. Give your audience at first glance the ability to find what it needs, in their vocabulary, with their problems, issues, and their interests addressed. People resonate with simple elegance in your message on your landing page: They want to see you, your book, your unique value addition front and center with ease of navigation to where they can read more. For example, my site at jelenpub.com shows three easy-to-grasp segments: my photo and tagline with friendly greeting, our book cover and its tagline connecting to our book website, and evidence of my following, which people can read more about and easily join. On the side are critical social buttons for more information, a link to my blog page, and a newsletter signup.

Plan Your Tabs and Component Parts of Each Page

      Stay simple and well-organized; an easy-to-grasp, easy-to-use website holds a viewer more efficiently and longer than a site with too much information. The essential author website tabs are listed later in this chapter.

Plan the Static Text of Your Author Website

      The static (unchanging) content of your site needs to be potent, so boil down your message to contain its essence, using keywords you know your audience uses. If you follow our advice to keep your blog on your own website, covered in Chapter 2, you automatically gain the changing, updating text that keeps your author site rich in content as you add posts and blog comments to form your community. You’ll see more reasons in the next chapter why it’s far better to blog on your author website than at another URL.

      

      All the static content on your author website pages needs to be precise, well written and well edited, and aligned with your audience’s interests. For models, review the websites of the authors featured in the success stories at the end of each chapter in this book, then customize to your needs.

Creating Your Author Website

      Whether you are creating a new site or updating an existing site with more interactive content and efficient tools, make sure your brand and added value, described in audience-friendly terms, show up front and center.

      People tend to gravitate to a simple, consistent approach: quality content, delivered to meet audience needs, plus consistent clear style, simplicity, and minimal design. Over time, these elements have proven to be attractive and compelling to readers, whether in book, magazine, or website format. Here are the steps we recommend in the initial stages of author website creation:

      Find