I have discovered, as I'm sure most of you have, if you're not Sarah Palin or George Bush, people are not lined up at the bookstore to buy your book.
Before donning the author hat, I was a realtor for 32 years. Much like being an author with a new book, just because a guy has a new real estate license, people probably aren't going to be beating down his door.
I learned quickly back then that the key to success is self-promotion --- that's not bragging, it's just letting people know you're out there and have a valuable product or service to offer.
There were hundreds of realtors in my market, so why should someone pick me to represent them?
There are millions of books in print. How are people going to find mine in the vast sea of published titles?
For an author, there seems to be a formula that many follow. First, you hope you have a publisher that will represent you and promote you to the bookstores and the public. Second, you schedule personal appearances at as many book signing events as possible. Third, you begin networking on the social media sites. Fourth, you write material for a blog or e-news magazine, and fifth, you set up a website to promote your books.
It is no coincidence that the responsibility for four of these five things falls directly on the shoulders of the author.
What I have discovered is that actually writing the novels was the easiest part of this whole process!
What I would like to discuss in this article is the author website.
A website and a new book have much in common. You can have a brilliantly written book, but if nobody knows about it, it will never be read. You can have a magnificent website, but unless people can find it, no one will come.
For me, the website was like my novel; building the site was easy and fun, but getting it seen is a nightmare.
I am sixty-seven years old and, as a realtor, had to be computer savvy, but this website promotion stuff was a whole new world. I soon learned that this 'old dog' had better learn some new tricks!
Fortunately, my son is a geek. He introduced me to the previously unknown world of search engine optimization, site directories, and back links. WHEW!
This whole 'getting noticed' thing seems to be a vicious circle. If no one ever visits your website, you will have a low ranking on the search engines and your site will be buried on page fifty-seven. But as more people visit and link to your site, your page ranking gets higher. He explained that getting listed in the site directories was one way to increase traffic. Another way was to have links from other people's website to yours --- back links --- reciprocal links.
That means that you find someone willing to trade links. You put a link to my website on your website and vise-versa.
That sounded pretty cool but I just couldn't see links to Joe's Auto Parts or the Pizza Pantry on my author website.
But having a page with links to other authors would fit right in.
My goal is to build a page on my website titled "Author Links". On that page would be categories for the various writing genres, mystery, romance, non-fiction, occult, etc.
The visitor would click on his topic of choice and links to the websites of authors writing in that genre would be available.
In return, of course, each author would have my link on her or her website. These reciprocal links will be seen by the bots and spiders and raise the page ranking for both sites. A win-win situation.
If you are an author interested in participating in exchanging reciprocal links, you may contact me at booksbybob@hotmail.com.
Check out my website at http://www.booksbybob.com.
Lady Justice Mystery/Comedy Novel Series
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Senior citizens fighting crime, a laugh-out-loud mystery series
