Each website is designed for a specific audience. Authors need to keep their readers in mind when they create their website. The primary objective of an author’s website is to connect with their readers and engage them. Apart from establishing a deep connection, the author website is also a marketing platform. In the Web 2.0 era, the authors need to be active participants in book marketing.
1. Building Reader List
Almost no website is complete without an email capture widget. Authors too need to keep track of their readers and fans. Building a list of your fans can help you reach out to them to get their opinion on a short story. You can also send new announcements or invite your fans to participate in a poll.
Sticky Popup Announcements and Email Capture plugin helps you create different lists and collect email addresses of your readers. You can ask for their email when they arrive at a specific page or just before they leave your author website.
2. Providing Sample Chapters
For new authors, sample chapters are very important. Readers may want to read a few pages to see if they like your writing before buying the book. Even your fans will appreciate the opportunity to read a few pages to see if they want to read your new book. After all, they would have surely flipped through a few pages before buying your book at the local bookstore.
Delightful Downloads provides an easy interface to upload sample chapters of your book and let your readers download them. The plugin also lets you restrict the download feature to your website members and redirect others to a different page of the author website. With some other features of the plugin, you can place the download links and buttons on any of your posts and pages, and even in the widget area.
3. Selling Books
Book sales are important. Online stores such as Amazon can get you good exposure, but they also charge a hefty fee to sell your books. With an estore you can sell your books to your readers and eliminate the vendor.
WordPress Simple PayPal Shopping Cart, though simple, is packed with features that will help you sell your books to the website readers. With the plugin, you can put an ‘Add to Cart’ buttons on your book pages. You can also create discount coupons and track the orders to check who has used the coupon code.
4. Building A Reader Community
Engaged readers become loyal fans. In the Web 2.0 world, content creation or airing an opinion is as important as reading new information. Communication has changed from authority to masses model and has become a two-way conversation. An active community of users can increase your reach and build your fan base.
BuddyPress can help you put that infrastructure in place. With social network like features, you can have your own special network woven around common interest. Readers get to create their profile pages, which displays their activity in the group, location, interests and so on. You can create different groups and users can choose to join the groups of their interest. They can also connect with other members of the group and send them direct messages. Although it offers many features, it is scalable and you can have only what you want.
5. Knowing What Readers Want
What can work better than asking your target audience what they want and then creating exactly that? Recently, television networks have used this approach to adjust the story, keep or remove a character, or change the way the season progresses. You too can create surveys and polls to gauge what your readers want from your characters.
Social Polls by OpinionStage help setup and run polls on your website. You can also share these on your social networks and get feedback from your connections on different networks. By hosting it on your website, you make it easy for passing visitors to participate in your polls.
6. Showcase Praise
Nothing beats word-of-mouth publicity. You could be selling your first book or your tenth, a few good reviews will never hurt. Readers always like to hear what other readers think about the book before making the Buy decision.
The GoodReviews plugin helps you embed reviews of your book from GoodReads on your website. You can easily add the shortcode to your book page and the reviews will be automatically updated as they are added on GoodReads.
The advantage of having a WordPress author website is the support of thousands of motivated developers who make these complex capabilities available for us through plugins. You don’t need to have any programming knowledge to install and get these plugins running on your WordPress website. And if this still seems to be chore, we are here to help you update your WordPress Websites so you get the most out of your web presence.
The post was originally published on the RightMix Technologies LLP blog.