Tag: websites

Why I Work on My Own Website

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn writing

Web Designer: I’ll create a knockout site for your books for only $50,000.

Me: Will it sell $50,000 worth of books?

Web Designer: Probably not.

Me: Then what good is it?

Web Designer: It will get me more work from the people who see it.

Me: Where does that leave me?

Web Designer: Where you are now with a website that looks like the inside of the kitchen junk drawer.

I run that conversation through my head every time I redesign my website and realize that redesigning it didn’t do any good. In fact, I run a similar conversation through my head any time somebody proposes a great marketing deal for authors: basically, I ask, will this promotion, ad, or publicity package sell more books than it costs me?

If not, then I’m going to be running at a loss in a way that I can’t, as the old joke goes, make up on volume.

The home page of my website has a dark picture of a forbidding forest. Seriously, that tells you more about me than thousands of words. Also, it weeds out the kind of people who are scared of walking into such a forest. If they are, they won’t like my books.

Will it sell any books? Probably not. Writing gurus say every writer needs a website, preferably one they can charge $50,000 to design. So what’s it for? Presence. However, you’ll see just how much presence you’re getting by noting that the average length of your site’s visits is less than a second. Wow: bots and speed readers.

And yet, magazine and book publishers won’t look at you unless you have a website that they probably won’t look at. They just need to see that you have it.

Bookselling is really quite humorous if you last long enough to see how it works.

—Malcolm

Advertisement

So many causes, so few dollars

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn Causes

Requests from organizations appear regularly in my e-mail, my Facebook newsfeed, and my mailbox out by the road. Some send calendars. Some send return address stickers. A few still send car window decals. Most of them send a message that’s hard to ignore. Over the years, I’ve probably supported more conservation organizations than anything else: that explains all the free scenic calendars.

Many of them hope I’ll make a minimum donation of $25. That’s not so bad if there are only one or two nonprofits involved. But, doing this can get expensive when you see a lot of worthy causes. What do you think is best, giving $25 to ten organizations or $250 to one organization? I can never decide.

My website includes the logos for four organizations, beginning with PEN America on the home page: “PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide. We champion the freedom to write, recognizing the power of the word to transform the world. Our mission is to unite writers and their allies to celebrate creative expression and defend the liberties that make it possible.” For a writer, the freedom to write is basic.

Next is WaterKeeper Alliance. I like their focus on clean rivers and the fact that you can donate and/or volunteer: “Waterkeeper Alliance ensures that the world’s Waterkeeper groups are as connected to each other as they are to their local waters, organizing the fight for clean water into a coordinated global movement.” Many of these groups, called river keepers, focus on specific rivers, often near enough to make it easy to, say, participate in river cleanup days.

I support the Glacier Park Conservancy because I’ve worked in Glacier Park, helped with publications in an earlier incarnation of the group, and like the fact they not only help support park projects but put on their own programs as well: “The Glacier National Park Conservancy is the official non-profit fundraising partner of Glacier National Park.” Their website always lists ongoing and upcoming projects to help park friends understand the need.

Since I live in a rural area, I’m attuned to the fact that a lot of people buy horses and then leave them on the property when they move away, or if they don’t move, ignore the horses at their peril. Just up the road is Sunkissed Acres which rescues old horses that are often sick or takes on horses when owners can no longer afford them: “Since our official beginning in 2004, hundreds of horses have been rescued, rehabilitated, rehomed, and if their pain is too much to bear… a humane and peaceful passing becomes our mission. The horses teach us so many valuable lessons from life skills to kindness, and they have become an integral part of our work.” As they say, they are often a horse’s last, best home.

—Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell’s coming-of-age adventure novel “Mountain Song” is free on Kindle October 15-17, 2020. The novel is set partly in Glacier National Park Montana.

Gurus say authors need websites

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn publishing2 Comments

In previous posts, I’ve noted that sites for name authors and sites for little-known authors are often quite different. The main difference is that prospective readers are searching for name authors’ sites and, I suppose, stumbling across little-known authors’ sites. Name authors can do less to promote their sites because people are coming there anyway.

Little-known authors seem to do better with sites featuring non-fiction than fiction because non-fiction usually focuses on subjects people are trying to learn more about and, in fact, are often just a portion of a larger site that promotes the business itself.

Fiction is a bit harder to sell because it’s tied so strongly to author name (or evolving notoriety), to reviews from major sites, and genre. Little-known authors seldom get reviews from major sites, so nothing “out there” is providing any help for their sites.

I’ve never sold books directly off my website because I don’t have time to handle a business where time spent getting paid and then driving to the post office with a book isn’t worth it. Non-fiction sites seem to be better equipped to deal with direct sales.

Some years ago, I gave up my original website provider because they had two versions of their website publishing software, ultimately keeping the version that was probably easier for them to support, but that had fewer features. The provider offered enough analysis of visitors’ behavior for me to see that the website also wasn’t earning its keep. By that, I mean, that there were too few click-throughs to my books’ links on Amazon and elsewhere.

My current site’s software is cheaper but has no analysis. But, based on the visitor counts (which aren’t too bad), I see little evidence that people are being influenced enough by the information on the site to buy the books.

So now, as the time approaches for me to decide whether to renew or delete the site, I’m leaning toward deleting it because Amazon algorithms and associated book advertisement newsletters have made it harder to sell books; I find that keeping the site is likely to cause me to run at a loss in 2020.

If you’re an author, do you have a website? If so, can you tell whether it’s helping you sell books or not? If it isn’t, do you keep it because it’s rather expected for authors to have a site–or for some other reason?

Just wondering,

Malcolm