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How to Create an Inexpensive yet Highly Effective Website for Your Book

Written by: Don Harold

Article Overview: Creating a website for your published work is inarguably the most important step in your book marketing program. The good news is, you can create a highly effective book website without shelling out big bucks. Read on and find out about the basic components of a low-cost yet highly effective website book website.

How to Create an Inexpensive yet Highly Effective Website for Your Book

*The succeeding article is about marketing self published books, Internet Marketing Promotion, Book Marketing Services, and many other useful tips about online book marketing.

After a long while, you finally got to publish your book.

With such an important product to promote, you’ve decided to create a website for your published work. Good thinking — a website is the most fundamental marketing tool an author can have. A well-designed website is an affordable and highly effective tool that will reinforce any book marketing program of any author.

From flamboyant, flash-and-java-enhanced sites to simpler, static sites, author and book websites come in many incarnations. If you’re working with a tight budget, however, here’s a simple guide to creating a simple-yet-effective author and book website.

Basic Page Layout

First, it’s highly important to study the characteristics of your book’s target market and pattern your design layout and copywriting after the results of your study. For instance, if your book is a teen romance novel (which has a market composed mostly of teenage females), your website’s dominant colors would be better off reflecting the preferred colors of females that belong to the 13-19-year age range.

Home page — The opening page of your site. The design and content plays a very integral part in web design, and never more so than in the construction of the “Home” page. The “Home” page is where you welcome site visitors and introduce them to the site and its features. This is where you get your first crack at capturing the interest of the site visitors, so make sure make good of your chance. For author websites, it’s very important for the author to connect to the site visitors right away, so make sure you charm the visitors with your words!

About the Book page — This is where the blurb or book description of the book is posted. How important is the blurb? Well, a blurb has the power to entice or repel a potential reader of a book. A well-written blurb can instantly turn a reader into a compulsive buyer, while a badly-written, uninspired blurb can make the reader yawn and forget your book. It’s that simple. Make it a priority to post a well-written blurb on the back jacket cover and website of your book.

Excerpt — An ideal book website should have an excerpt page. Just like what teaser trailers do for movies, excerpts give the readers a sample of what’s in store for them should they decide to purchase your book. In short, excerpts whet the appetites of the readers, so picking the right excerpt page is of paramount importance.

So, when choosing the excerpt contents, pick the body of text that will capture the readers and leave them wanting for more. It may consist of a solitary page, or perhaps even a whole chapter — the important thing is to captivate the reader and compel them to read the entirety of your book.

Blog page — An “author blog” is one of the most effective — and perhaps most underrated — book marketing tools in the current book marketing landscape. While many authors are not aware of this, a well-designed and frequently updated blog webpage effectively translates into avid reader patronage. The reason is this: books that capture a reader’s interest do not go unremembered, and neither does the author who wrote it.

Enamored readers want to get involved. A memorable reading experience makes readers want to know the author, as well as the book’s themes, and back story. They want to know the current and upcoming projects of the author who has so effectively captured their imagination and touched their emotions. As mentioned earlier, they want to be involved. A website blog will take care of this area with optimum effect.

Order page — Once you’ve succeeded in enticing the site visitors to buy your published work, they will want to know how they can order your book. Make sure your website smoothly facilitates your would-be readers in this area by featuring your website with links to bookstores that sell your book (the more the better).

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Article Tags: author websites, blurb, book description, book marketing, book websites, copywriting, design layout, dominant colors, incarnations, marketing program, marketing services, marketing tool, other useful tips, page layout, preferred colors, romance novel, target market, teen romance, teenage females, tight budget



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