Author Websites Are Essential

Matthew Haigh on February 24, 2021Author Website, Marketing Books

Author Websites Are Essential To Your Success And Here’s Why.

You need a place to communicate with your readers. Readers already like your writing and your ideas. After all, they googled you; looked up your website after finishing your book. Your readers sought you out, and now they want to know more! They want to know about you, your newest projects, potential sales, writing process, hobbies, and even your favorite dessert! Build a lasting community on your website will help you promote new work coming out, all using this connection.
You own your website. Social media is great but ultimately controlled by other corporations. They get to say what you can and can’t post while controlling your data. Your website works for you and only you. Your business and artistic priorities are at the forefront, not someone else’s.
A website makes you money. There are many great reasons to have a website that is all about your readers. First, it develops your community and your craft, but the MAIN REASON is that websites are revenue engines. The pandemic has shown this to be more important than ever. As other sources of author income dried up, leaving many grasping for solid ground. Every single part of a website builds your bottom line. From collecting email addresses to building your email list – one of your most powerful sales tools. Sell your book directly with no middle-man involved. In conclusion, a website is one of the most significant returns on investment an author can make because it is packed with revenue potential making it absolutely essential.

Did you know, aside from the best Print-on-Demand Book Printing available, that Presto Page offers Website building /Marketing/ Consulting Packages for our authors? We understand author websites are essential and how it links to your success. This is why we work with a team of talented individuals that help our authors reach their full revenue potential. Click here to find out more!

Increase Your Book Revenue with The Perfect Sales Page

The Perfect Book Sales Page

If you want people to buy your book(s) from your website’s sales page, you’ll want your website to work properly and do these three things:

Get readers to sign up for your newsletter so you can continue to build relationships with them. So you can market other books, products, programs, and services to them. Keep the design simple and only have that ONE focus on the webpage (no other links to other CTA’s)
Make it easy for them to see all your books; avoid a cluttered or messy design.
Make it easy for readers to get in touch with you if they have a problem or want more information. If your website doesn’t do these three things, you’re leaving money on the table. Luckily, they are all easy to fix and if you need help, hire a good web person.

Author Website

Your author’s website is helpful if you have several books around a theme or mission, and let’s be honest, you should. It’s useful if you bring new traffic by writing-related content somehow connected to the theme or subjects of your book. But if it’s just a landing page meant to sell a book, you don’t need a blog. In fact, an empty blog with no content may be even worse for sales.

Most importantly, your website will only do something if you promote it (people won’t naturally find your website if it doesn’t have a lot of rich content – but you can direct them to it). If the only aim of your website is to sell the book or maybe get an email option for a free giveaway (which long-term will be better for you), you may only need a “landing page.”

Landing Page

A landing page is usually a one-page sales letter. There aren’t any distractions; just a very well-written. Psychologically powerful organization of details, reviews, and pictures to “close the sale.” They work, and they work well.

Do you have an author’s site? Or a book section on your main website? (If you need any recommendations, email me, and I can give you some resources.)

Pain Points for First Time Authors

Matthew Haigh on July 20, 2020new authors, pain points for self-publishers, Publishing vs self-publishing

Self-Publishing Pain Points for First-time Authors

A lot of time and effort learning how to self-publish.
Unprofessional products will be poorly received.
It takes a lot of time to carry out each publishing phase without a professional team’s guidance and knowledge.
It is expensive to hire professionals that can help.

Traditional Publishing Pain Points for First-time Authors

It is challenging to acquire a deal (finding an agent, writing a proposal, shopping the proposal, waiting for an offer, facing possible rejection).
A significant time investment.
You are sharing your ownership rights.
Book marketing will be up to them, leading to edits and content changes you may disagree with.
Creativity and content will be under review, and you may lose control of your original vision.
Low royalty percentages because there are more hands involved and small advancements until you prove worthy.

The Advantages of Self-Publishing with Print on Demand:

It can reach niche markets. Most publishing companies will reject a book without a large mainstream audience.
Higher profit percentage than traditional publishing will offer.
You maintain your work’s exclusive rights.
Total creative control throughout the entire process.
Get a book to market faster.
Help authors that generally do not produce a lot of revenue, such as poetry. (I.e., A poet who was successful through self-publishing is Walt Whitman.
Influencers and gurus who already have a following for reasons beyond writing will thrive with self-publishing.

Here at Presto Page, we strive to eliminate all the pain points for all our authors. Free downloadable templates for both Text and Book Covers, free ground shipping(within the continental US). Exceptional customer service, willing to go above and beyond to help you succeed; all the resources to get you on all the platforms.

Four binding styles and online calculators with Instant Pricing – for Soft Cover / Perfect Bound, Saddle-Stitch, Plastic Coil, and Twin Loop Wire-O.

John Steinbeck’s Advice and Anti-advice for Aspiring Writers

Matthew Haigh on June 9, 2020Aspiring writers, Author, Author Advice, John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

John Steinbeck’s Advice for Aspiring Writers

I ran across this article, and it’s a piece of must-share advice for our aspiring writers. John Steinbeck has written many classics. The Grapes Of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, and East of Eden, to name a few. John has created sprawling landscapes and relatable characters. His work has always been littered with social commentary. He was a brave and experimental writer-one who wasn’t afraid to take any chances.

Here is a quick list of his advice for aspiring writers:

When Writing, Write Freely And As Rapidly As Possible. Throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down.
Forget Your Generalized Audience, Write For A Single Reader. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death. Second place, unlike the theatre, it doesn’t exist in writing. In writing, your audience is one single reader.
Speak Outloud When You’re Writing Dialogue. If you are using dialogue, say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.

Steinbeck Also Offers Some Anti-Advice

“If there is magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.”

John Steinbeck and Stephen King seem two agree on the principles of writing. They both tell writers not to write for a broad audience. They also tell writers not to be scared. Write openly and write freely.

So get writing, and come up with something great. Write for yourself, and don’t stop.

For the full and original article, please visit: John Steinbeck

Two Main Elements to Attract Book Buyers

Matthew Haigh on February 19, 2020Book Covers, Book Description, Marketing Books, Marketing My Book

Attracting Book Buyers

Two essential promotional elements will attract book buyers: a great book cover and a killer book description. No matter how good a book might be, if a reader’s interest is lost before they finish reading the book description, then there is absolutely no hope of reading the preview. Let alone buying the book.

The two main elements to attract book buyers and how to get them to work for you.

The cover and blurb are the two primary elements in marketing that attract and engage potential book buyers. But it seems that while most self-published authors have learned to produce or buy quality book covers, many have failed to appreciate the importance of their book’s description. I would say that many have been written quickly at the time of publishing, with little or no thought given to it at all. It would be best if you gave a lot of thought to attracting and engaging readers.

Another critical factor is to include keywords relevant to the story within the first 160 characters or about 15 words of the description.

Why is this so important?

Search engines will index a book’s description with the title as the heading, and then the first 160 characters as the description will enable people to find your book on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

While this will make the book description on Amazon and Kindle more discoverable, it leads to a second conclusion.

Reusing the same description for a book on every site is a bad idea to attract book buyers. Search engines generally will not add more links, as the content is all the same.

However, that opens the door to an opportunity.

Have more than one book description.

Having several book descriptions, using different keywords in the first sentence will give a book a far better chance of gaining more indexing. Posting a modified version of a book’s description should result in additional search engine listings.

Finding more sites to add different book description versions can only increase your book’s promotional and marketing chances.

Your book description needs to work for you.

Make your book description work for you, and never underestimate its power in attracting a potential book buyer.

Many advice sites on the Internet offer ideas and tips for writing an excellent book description. Do a Google search on writing a unique book description and get some ideas.

At the same time, don’t forget about the power of search engine listings to increase your book sales.

Spend time researching and collecting a list of about fifty single and long-tail keywords related to the story. That will attract more organic traffic and write each new book description version around two or three keywords.

Is it time to give your two main promotional elements some more thought?

Here are some more ideas on Book Cover Design.

Book Cover Design

Matthew Haigh on February 11, 2020Avoid book cover mistakes, Book Cover Design, Book Covers, Book success

The Book Cover’s Design is Critical to a Book’s Success.

Book cover design is critical to a book’s success, and there is a lot more to consider than you might expect. Keep in mind these five things when working on your next cover, and watch it drive sales.

Also, as a self-publisher, you can always change the cover of your book. So, if you have a cover you think might be hurting your sales? Swap it out for a new one and compare your numbers.

When you ask an artist or graphic designer to commission a book cover, ask them to follow these guidelines. Unless, of course, your genre demands other considerations.

An image of the protagonist or the antagonist is the central point of interest.
All factors considered the body mass of this image is placed in one of the four corners, as defined by the Rule of Thirds.
All other elements in the scene need to project leading lines toward the central vision.
The other features in the cover mimic the mise en scene of the narrative.
Often, I use custom-designed fonts for cover text, but it is not necessary. You want a font that is native to the background of the story.

For more info on formating your book cover, click HERE and go to the book cover dropdown.

If you’d like to see a great breakdown of popular covers, what works verse what doesn’t, then please check out a post by King Jaz by clicking here.

Improvements:

The author’s title isn’t getting lost at the top of the book and isn’t in danger of trimming off.
The title is no longer disappearing into the background and is popping with an eyecatching, contrasting color.
The image of the face is framed with the type and is more visually appealing because it follows the Rule of Thirds(see the second example below).

Book Covers LOVE the Rule of Thirds

The Rule of Thirds’ premise is that when key elements or objects (such as horizon lines) cross the page at a division of thirds, rather than in half, the image is more appealing. Have you ever noticed that photographs look better when the horizon line crosses the page at the upper or lower third rather than straight through the middle?

Using the Rule of Thirds as the basis of your layouts, you can design visually appealing book covers with little time or effort.

Start with a blank page and divide it into thirds horizontally, then again vertically to create a nine-box grid. The lines and intersections will serve as guides for placing key text and graphics. The fourth illustration below gives you an idea of how the page can be divided and laid out using some, but not all, of the grid lines and spaces.

Manuscript: Do’s and Don’ts

Matthew Haigh on January 16, 2020self-publishing, Setting up manuscripts, text pages

Manuscript’s Do’s and Don’ts

Here are some quick pros and cons to help you with your manuscript. It can feel overwhelming but these simple guidelines will help.

Some Manuscript DO’s for you to follow:

1. Use an easy-to-read font that everyone has, like Times New Roman, in 12 pt, black.

2. Double-space the text (line spacing) and remove extra space before and after paragraphs.

3. Use left justification.

4. Use tab stops (rather than tabs). If you use actual tabs, we will have to remove the tabs themselves before formatting your book and replacing the tabs with tab stops.

5. Use Center Alignment to move chapter headings to the center (do not use tabs or spaces).

6. Any word you want to be italicized should be italicized even if it’s a formatting choice (for example, if you’re going to italicize any dreams or thoughts).

And of course, the dreaded Manuscript Don’ts:

1. Don’t get fancy with fonts. Stick to that one readable font face and size in the manuscript phase.

2. Don’t use multiple hard returns to start a new page for each chapter. Instead, insert a page break.

3. Don’t use multiple hard returns to make text after chapter titles appear lower on the page. Use the “space after” option in your layout program.

4. Don’t use Word paragraph styles in your manuscript. Unless you’re using Word as the final program to format your books, these styles introduce all sorts of junk when they are imported into different layout programs.

5. If you want your chapter titles to be all caps, don’t manually write them out as all caps. Just use a “paragraph style” in Microsoft Word, either with the all caps option or with a font that only has all caps characters. In fonts like this, the actual capital letters are slightly more significant than the other letters, and you mess up that effect by capitalizing your titles manually.

6. Don’t use tabs to line up any columns.

Let us know in the comments below if you have any questions about how you should format your manuscript. Or check out a more detailed description and how-to HERE.

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