Charlie’s Choice

Weekly Tips to Help You write,

Publish & Promote Your Work 

DESIGNING A POWERFUL WEB SITE 

      Two words must dominate all of your thinking as you begin to plan your new web site:

Content and Usability. 

      As I have repeated in so many different contexts, “Content is King.” So too in the planning of your web site. A physically attractive site may catch the eye of the reader, but the content on that site—the information you are able to pass on to your visitors—is what will keep them the. It will ensure they visit your inside pages and return again and again as you update and add to the material that you include.

      Usability means your site will pop up quickly when busy surfers click on it. It will guide them speedily and efficiently through the site and help them locate the information they seek. Your navigation bar or panel must be easy to understand and must be uniform on every page.

Thinking It Through

      Step one in creating a site with outstanding usability and content is to be certain of what it is you want your site to do. Have you planned it simply to showcase you as an individual? Is your primary concern to sell your books and/or other products? Or is it your object to create a site that will serve only as a resource to others seeking information?

      These are three very different objectives, and as a result the sites will be designed differently. You decision will determine where and how information is placed throughout the site. For example, if it is your showcase, then you will be featured up front and all supplemental pages will be designed to support the image you create on the home page. 

      You may have multiple products you are trying to sell: a book or books, an e-book or possibly coaching or editing services. Will you turn the home page into a shop where surfers can find all of your products for sale?  Or will you feature one of these on the home page and relegate the other to inside pages? 

      Think like the surfer who is going to visit your site. What would you want to find if you were to visit this site? These are very important decisions that you as the author must make before contacting a professional site designer or attempting to do it yourself with one of the free template design programs that you can find on the Web. 

Home Page

      This serves as the front door to your site…as the welcome for surfers who stop by to visit you. Of course, as you’ll learn a bit later, you can and should also invite people to visit one of your pages directly without a stop up front. Nonetheless, the bulk of visitors will arrive on the home page first. Your challenge is to make it inviting to both those persons and to the spiders dispatched by the search engines to find the keywords we spoke about last week.

       Tests have proved that the eye starts by looking at the upper left hand segment of the page. The spiders begin here as well. Therefore your story should be told in this corner as succinctly as possible with the fewest words that describe the information your site contains.

      For example, on one of my sites promoting a book on writing as a retired senior citizen, the top left reads simply “Retirement– Writing.”  Since the eye then captures what is alongside that, the statement is reinforced and expanded at the top center/right with “Everything you need to now about writing & publishing in your retirement years.”  Visitors to the site immediately know that they are in the right place to find exactly what they desire.

      You can then use the area below these headlines (or titles) to feature whatever you wish in the text. Since narrower copy blocks are preferable in formatting online pages, don’t stretch your lines from margin to margin. Use your remaining white space wisely. It should help set off your text and allow it to pop off the page.

      Because real estate on a web page is highly valuable, you may well want to place your navigation panel along one side of the page. Or, if you have product to sell, you may want to highlight it in boxes along the side, offering surfers the chance to buy the item simply by clicking on a button in the box that will bring them to the purchase page or to a page that describes the product more fully.

Creating the Page

      The eye begins its journey at the top left corner of the page, as I explained, and then wanders down through the copy block, ending at the bottom right hand corner. Just as every good newspaper editor strives to place the most significant news stories above the fold, so you should present your text in an inverted way with the most important highest up on the page.

      Some visitors will not bother to scroll down to the copy below the area that is visible immediately. Therefore the content that displays in the opening window must be strong enough to convince the reader to continue to scroll below. Nonetheless, it is wise to try and keep your home page copy as short and punchy (and informative) as possible.

      Don’t be afraid to use bullets to highlight portions of your text. Break up the blocks with bold face subheads placed logically as dividers. But don’t overdo either of these.

      Once readers move to an inner page, they are usually hooked strongly enough to be able to sustain their interest throughout a more expanded copy block. However, it is still wise to place the more compelling copy higher in the story to entice the visitor to keep on reading.

      Graphics can add interest to a page, but use them sparingly for they can also impede the flow of the information you are trying to relate. If you do use them, be sure to add a text caption first to describe what you are showing and second to allow the spiders to understand it.

Inner Pages

      If you are selling a product, it is wise to present it by itself on an inner page. Your sales pitch should not suffer from distractions on the page. While the style of the top of the page should resemble the home page, the header copy should be written to pertain to this specific product. That way, by adding a “/name of the product” to your domain name, you will be able to bring the surfer directly to this selling page.

      Once again the rules for formatting your copy pertain. I have told you that you can go longer without concern that your reader may not scroll down, but the issue of width of your block is as important as it was on the home page. Keep a healthy amount of white space on the page.

        It is vital to reproduce the identical navigation bar or panel on every page and preferable to try and locate it in the same spot on the page. Each of these considerations contributes to the improved usability of your site.

      The basic elements of an author’s web site are the home page, author’s bio page, sales page (also called landing page) for the book you are selling and a press room page where journalists can quickly find the information they need. The site can be expanded at any time to include other material that will make it even more interesting to the visitors. If you’ve written them, it is smart to add a page with all of the articles you have crafted that pertain to the basic subject of the book you are selling.

      If you employ a professional designer, he/she will be certain to add standard elements like privacy statements, links from and to other sites and possibly a sign-up box for your mailing list or newsletter. There is a great deal of flexibility once you ensure inclusion of the basic elements that we discussed.

      Now that you have the home base that a web site offers, we can begin to explore other elements of the promotion programs that you might undertake. Next week, we’ll talk about obtaining book reviews that can be placed on the web site and on other sites to sell your books.

See you then.

      Keep Writing!

Technorati Profile

CALIFORNIA BECOMES THE 4^TH STATE TO PROTECT

AGAINST UNFAIR FOREIGN LIBEL SUITS 

With Governor Scharzenneger’s signing of a libel tourism law, California joins Illinois, Florida and New York in protecting publishers and authors from libel judgments by foreign courts in countries that do not meet the standards of the First Amendment of our Constitution. 

Several cases filed in recent months in courts of foreign jurisdictions have found American authors guilty of libel. Surprisingly, even some of the most advanced western European court systems do not offer the level of free press protection that is standard here in the United States. 

Hopefully, some of the remaining states will adopt laws similar to those already in place here.  
 

Technorati Profile

FTC RULING ON ENDORSEMENTS HAS THE

BLOGGING WORLD IN AN UNNECESSARY UPROAR 

The blogosphere exploded last week when the Federal Trade Commission announced tightened rules on compensated product endorsements and testimonials. The word swept though the blogging world that fines in the amount of $11,000 would be imposed on any blogger who had a “material connection” to the supplier of that product. 

FTC Assistant Director Richard Cleland has cleared up the misunderstanding. He states, “Reports that there is a monetary penalty for violating these guidelines is untrue. The FTC does not have the authority to impose a fine for a violation of the FTC Act.” 

Cleland went on to point out that while the blogger or endorser wouldn’t be fined, the advertiser would. According to Cleland, the FTC has never brought suit simply because a material connection was not disclosed. Suits are brought when false information is disseminated, particularly about health or safety products. 

Technorati Profile

CONFUSION REIGNS IN DISCUSSIONS OF THE EFFECTIVENESS

OF E-MAIL WHEN COMPARED TO SOCIAL NETWORKING  

The lofty pundits at the Wall Street Journal recently made the pronouncement “E-mail’s reign is over.”  Even as sage an observer of the publishing scene as Penny Sansievieri, for whom I have great respect, joined the chorus, quoting the Journal’s article that pronounced e-mail’s demise. 

As recently as in the October 7^th edition of this blog, I quoted another of the several research firms that disagree with the WSJ conclusions. Both Bereford Research and the experts at eMarketer found that e-mail continues to be more popular than social networking as a communications tool. 

In August, a report issued by Nielson stated that there was a 21% growth in e-mail usage over the previous year. 

Yes, there are some problems, as Sansevieri points out. It is tough for the sender to be certain that his/her message will arrive safe and sound after penetrating the fortress wall of SPAM. There is also the concern that your message will get lost in the huge amount of mail most people receive every day.  

I send out hundreds of e-mails every week bringing a personal copy of the Charlie‘s Choice column directly to the computer of each of the subscribers to my WiseWriter program. The bounces are minimal. Not enough to worry about, and so the subscriber list grows and grows. 

I’m not prepared to write off this tried and true online workhorse, and urge all of you to value it for the comunications advantages it offers.

Technorati Profile

PUBLISHERS DIFFER IN RESPONSE TO

PRICING COMPETITION FROM E-BOOKS 

Harper announced last week that it was moving up the publication date for Sarah Palin’s memoir Going Rogue: An American Life to November 17. It was originally scheduled for next spring. Concerned about losing hardcover sales (the print run is 1.5 million copies) to an e-book edition, Harper will not release the e-book edition until December 26. 

The publisher will be studying the results of its move very carefully trying to determine the degree to which electronic editions either add to overall volume or cannibalize hardcover sales.  

This is the first time Harper has delayed an e-book edition, and in fact it is releasing both print and electronic editions of Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton just one week later. That should provide an interesting contrast. 

The Harper decision follows an announcement by Twelve, a Hachette Group imprint that it was indefinitely delaying the e-book version of Senator Edward Kennedy’s memoir True Compass. The book was first released in a leather-bound private edition priced at $1,000. The hardcover edition (1.5 print run) is now selling at $35. 

Mid-September, Random House simultaneously released Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol in both hardcover and e-book format to a huge sales response in both media. 

The question of whether e-books represent a threat or a boon to publishers is an ongoing question. We looked at the economics of the situation in a previous post on September 30. We’ll be watching and reporting developments as they occur. 

Technorati Profile

LOCAL COMMUNITY RADIO

GETS A BOOST FROM CONGRESS 

After extended pressure from groups like Free Press, a subcommittee of the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly last week for a bill that would open the airwaves to hundreds of local independent radio stations. 

The activist group is determined to see the bill, Local Community Radio Act (HR 1147) move swiftly through the balance of the legislative process. The present subcommittee approval is the furthest it has ever reached in any of its past attempts.  

The goal is to secure support from 90 bipartisan co-sponsors, and the group is asking for $25 contributions to bring independent local stations to communities across the country. Click on to

www.freepress.net to donate to this very worthy cause.

Technorati Profile

COURT RULES FOR RELEASE OF

CHENEY’S “PLAMEGATE” RECORDS 

In a breakthrough that has to delight every author, writer and journalist, as well as any decent thinking American, VP Dick Cheney’s involvement in the highly controversial leak of  CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity is being made public. 

The sneering former VP who constantly refused to release any information and regularly dismissed public opinion as meaningless, may finally be getting his just desserts after a ruling by US District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan that all documents relevant to the Plame case must be released under the Freedom of Information Act. 

Cheney was generally despised by the majority of citizens. A poll taken last May by CNN revealed that only 37% of Americans have a favorable opinion of him. I’m awfully proud that I’m one of the other 63%.   

Technorati Profile

GANNETT ANNOUNCES 3^RD QUARTER PROFITS ARE

SUBSTANTIALLY AHEAD OF WALL ST. FORECASTS 

It sure is great to hear some favorable news in our troubled publishing industry. After several years of crashing profits and closings of magazines and newspapers, the Gannett Co says it anticipates third quarter profits will beat forecasts by Wall Street analysts by a healthy margin. Stock shares in the company jumped 17%, capping a summer-long upturn. 

Is it possible that the downturn is softening? Perhaps not really, when you hear that the company also plans to sell $400 million in notes to raise capital and pay off debt. But it surely is refreshing to hear any news on the plus side these days.   

Technorati Profile

Charlie’s Choice

Weekly Tips to Help You Write,

Publish & Promote Your Work 

CONVERTING YOUR WEB SITE INTO

YOUR PROMOTIONAL HOME BASE 

      When tackling on and offline promotion nothing is more important than developing a powerful and effective home base. It is the place to which you can direct people when you promote in print, on broadcast or digitally. A place where they can find information about you and about your book(s). If you offer other products, such as book coaching, editing, ghost writing or even t-shirts or other items imprinted with your book name or cover this is where they can learn more about them and place an order.

      Here in America, 147 million people are computer literate and use the Internet frequently, so you can see how important it is to develop a strong web site. In addition, a study by Columbia University’s School of Journalism recently found that 98% of working journalists turn to the Internet to find experts to contact when they are working on a story. The combination of such a large percentage of web literate Americans and the active use of the Web by journalists makes your site an irreplaceable tool for building your reputation as an expert and selling your books.

      The site doesn’t have to be highly complex. Nor does it have to run on for pages and pages. I have seen effective author sites that are only three pages long, containing an informative home page, an “About” page that gives information about the author and a sales page where the book can be purchased. Frankly, I feel there is a need for several more pages in a really meaningful site.

      But before describing the pages thatI feel are necessary and why, let’s take the time to understand  the process of naming your site and using very basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which is the way a person interested in you, your book or the topic your book deals with searches for you. Better yet, it is the methodology by which someone who has never heard of you or your book discovers you.

Search Engine Optimization

      I’m sure that you have clicked onto your favorite search engine when you wanted to find someone or something on the Internet. You typed in a word or phrase that you felt best described what it was you were looking for. That word or phrase is called a “keyword.” Very often several different keywords can bring you to the same site when you search. Of course, some are more effective than others.

      But in order for the keyword you punch in to connect with a web site that you want and give you the information you seek, there must be a corresponding keyword on the site it brings you to. At the simplest level, you might enter the word “writing” when searching for my site. Thousands of sites will come up, although mine may not be among those that appear on the first few pages of your search results. (And you won’t continue to search beyond those first few. Very few people do.)

      If you then become more precise by adding the word “retirement” and create the combination “writing in retirement” or “retirement writing,” my site will pop up because that is the name of my site. This procedure unfortunately is not quite as simple as it sounds. For ideal keyword SEO, you must also take into consideration the popularity of the word. That means how many other sites use that word.

      What you strive for is a word or phrase that can match your target site in some way, but is not extensively used. One of the best ways to overcome the problem is to tack on a second word such as “retirement” in “retirement writing” to narrow down the options. Use one of the keyword locator companies available on the Internet to help you search and check the level of usage. Wordtracker is one of the best, and offers a free trial.

      There are many other SEO techniques that time and space won’t let us discuss, such as linking your site to another in the same field. But if you learn to insert keywords properly throughout your titles, headers and body text, you will bring lots of searches to your site.

Naming Your Site

      I’ll try and keep this very simple, for if you decide to hire a professional web site designer, he/she can help you create the best “domain name.” This is nothing more than a fancy term for the name of your site.

      You choose a catchy name that reflects the content of your books. The professional designer you select will help you lease the Domain Name for a given period of time and choose a suffix for it. You have seen these: .com, .net, etc.

      You can do it yourself by using one of the programs listed on the search engines, like www.godaddy.com. In either case, you will then end up with an identification for your site that will look something like http://www.writingexpert.com.

      Next you add an electronic address (writingexpert@aol.com, for example). That combination becomes your “URL” (Universal Resource Locator). It is the way someone finds you if they want to contact you by e-mail.

      Following that, you must initiate the steps to connect your site to the World Wide Web. This step is called “hosting,” and should better be left to a professional.

Creating Your Site

      If you are starting from scratch, you again have the choice of hiring a professional or attempting to create your web site yourself with the help of the free templates you can find on the Internet. I urge you to choose a professional. Since your site is so basic to everything you do online, every dollar that you spend to ensure quality will be returned tenfold or more.

      An expenditure of as little as $300 can produce a strong, basic site. You might even turn to a design school in your region, and hire one of the students if you want to lower the expense still further. Whether you design a new site or upgrade your existing one, do it right. 

      Keep your site simple and easy to navigate. Place a readily accessible “navigation bar” on every page. This allows visitors to shift from page to page effortlessly. Don’t overload the page with endless verbiage. Surfers are always in a rush to find the information they seek. Present your text in short, informative sentences. Use adequate white space to allow your words to stand out.

      Like your text, the graphics on your site should reflect the essence of your expertise. Your goal in using graphics is not just to create a pretty site; it is developing a site rich in information, and graphics can contribute if done well. Remember, as I stress over and over again to my students and clients, “content is key!” 

      Next week, as we discuss each page of an author’s web site, we will be talking a great deal about content and what that content should be emphasizing on each of the pages you create. On every page, your words must portray the benefits that specific page offers your reader. See you then.

      Keep Writing! 

Technorati Profile

LIBRARIANS TO HEAR AAP’S PREVIEW

OF FORTHCOMING SPRING BOOK TITLES 

More than 100 collection librarians from the Tri-State area have been invited to a luncheon on October 21 hosted by the Library Committee of the Association of American Publishers (AAP). They will hear a presentation of titles in a variety of genres, both fiction and nonfiction, that will be released this spring by 11 of the nation’s leading book publishers. 

Keynote speaker at the luncheon will be Marilyn Johnson, author of This Book Is Overdue, published by Harper Collins.  

Technorati Profile