I Created My Book Page

I get a ton of article links in my in box, and if the topic seems interesting, I'll give it a whirl. The problem I find with most of these articles is that they offer nothing new. It's the same worn-out advice I've read a million times...always some author's success story ~ due to them doing whatever it is the columnist is pushing. Good for that author, but that author isn't me. I'd actually be more impressed if the writer laid out their steps, then cited a real world example of an author who tried it and it didn't work. At least it would be more realistic.

Worse, the writer might be pushing something I've already tried, with zero success, but hey! It really, really works! Joe Zamboni sold 10,000 copies doing that thing! (If you look long enough, you can find someone who succeeded, and you can attribute their success to your sage advice.)

Needless to say, I'm jaded. 

I'm a big purveyor of YouTube, and since everything online seems to be interconnected, the app will populate my queue with subjects I've been researching. That led me to Thomas Umstattd and his Novel Marketing podcast, which then led me to his site, Author Media. I like this guy, and more importantly, I trust him. First of all, he really works at presenting unambiguous, thorough advice, and his videos provide examples of what he's espousing. He also has a marketing course that an author can access for free. If I remember correctly, I was granted free access simply by subscribing to his newsletter. 

What interested me in his material initially were his website videos, which are eye-opening. He's the person who convinced me that an author's website needs to have a separate page for each of his or her books. Now granted, I have eleven published books, so I'm not going to do that, and I don't even want to promote a few of them because they're lost causes at this point. What I am interested in is my latest novel; you know the one ~ it's my big fat failure. (I'm aware that doesn't exactly narrow it down.) The big fat failure I actually care about, to be precise.

In a previous post, I linked to his list of required book page elements, but here it is again, if you don't want to go back. That's a whole lot of stuff! One drawback for me is that Thomas is clearly a big fan of WordPress, which I don't use, and thus the plugins he recommends are only WordPress-friendly. But what those recommendations did for me was; a) gave me a new element to think about; and b) sent me looking for plugin/app alternatives. 

If Thomas had posited that his entire list of things to include was "just because", well, I would have clicked out of his site as quickly as I click out of all those tired articles I talked about. There has to be a reason to go to all that work, and it was a lot of work. His bottom line is discoverability. And if my novel can be described as anything, it's "undiscovered".

I spent a whole lot of time yesterday and also in the days preceding, getting things ready for my book page. I designed a few Canva projects, I looked up a bunch of stuff I needed to know. I constantly referred back to "the list". I didn't like the look of some of my additions, so I redesigned them. All that character art, which took hours and hours to create? In the end, most of it was scrapped. I scrolled through my entire manuscript to capture every character in order to compile a compendium.

While I'm proud of the finished project (is it ever truly finished?), I'm keenly aware of Blogger's limitations. My elements would be more impactful on a full, fat page, but my template is too narrow to accommodate that, so to see everything requires scrolling. I don't know if a different template would be better or if I can change my side margins any more than I already have. Or, more likely, there's nothing I can do to achieve the effect I want.

Here's a list of everything I included:

• a big, clear book cover image
• a tagline
• pricing
• buy buttons
• a new (yes, again) full book blurb
• a snippet of my one editorial review, with a link 
• "About Me", which links to my bio page
• all the metadata about the book
• the tropes, illustrated by an image with squiggly lines
• my character art condensed into a side-by-side image collage
• a link to my book club questions
• a link to my character compendium
• my flipbook preview
• my dedicated Spotify playlist 

There is more I can add, like a Q&A and what Thomas calls "DVD Commentary" (only book-related); both things I may do in the future, but for now the page is mostly finished.

So, here it is. Looking at it makes me want to revise my entire site to somehow make it better. I just haven't figured out how to do it yet, and especially how to do it with Blogger's built-in limitations.

I know me; I'll keep working.

Now if only someone would "discover" it.