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"Send me a media kit," the radio host requests. "Are you near your computer?" you ask. Within seconds he's viewing all your best bytes and topics of expertise. Does a book reviewer need a photo? "Lift it off the site," you suggest. The cost of producing a media kit can be many times that of a Web site. Often, Web sites are completely free. Just setting one up won't bring buyers, but having one allows you to take advantage of the free and low-cost publicity available on the internet. And the best reason to have a site: You can register it with Autographed By Author. We'll do the hard part, delivering buyers to you.
Take the plunge … you'll discover it's more like a dip in a hot tub. Putting up a Web site is much easier than the projects you did while writing or publishing your book. The simplest Web sites are also free. Why not start with one of them? The Web hosting companies show you how to use their site building programs. Within a couple of hours you can have something on-line. You'll probably want to improve it later, but taking the first step now will put you in the game. You did most of your site-building work as you wrote your press releases. Paste some of your best PR material onto your home page in a way that turns interested visitors into buyers. Determine what your visitors want and convince them that buying your book will give it to them. Don't waste valuable Web space, especially page tops, on publisher information. A simple "contact us" page will allow you to take e-mail, fax, phone, and mail orders. The site building programs provide the page layouts with forms for visitors to fill out. You just modify those templates by adding your information. Any message a visitor leaves gets e-mailed to you automatically.
Freeservers is one of hundreds of hosts which allow you to build your site on their computer. To support their service, they place an advertising banner at the top of your page. If you want to remove it, you pay $3.32 per month. The instructions for using the site building program are easy to understand. To open a Freeservers account, go to www.freeservers.com and follow the instructions. Within hours (they say five minutes) you can have a working site. You can choose an address of http://YourBookName.8m.com at no charge. Give yourself an hour or two to build a "home" page and "contact" page. If you have a scanner, you might want to fill in the "about us" page and put your picture there. Use the scanner to put your book cover on the home page also. By the way. I get nothing from Freeservers. I've just used them and like them for simple sites. I especially like their site statistics. Unfortunately, as of December, 2001, they discontinued their statistics for free sites. They still offer it for their premium packages. I'm sure there are dozens of servers as good or better than Freeservers. Many ISPs provide free Web sites for their clients.
David vs. Amazon Your site might look like a roadside vegetable stand next to a superstore like Amazon, but that's O.K.. We're promoting the personal touch at Autographed By Author. People who buy books at Amazon can't contact the author or have their books signed. Low-tech and friendly is O.K.. Feature the benefits by saying something like "You're buying from the author, not a machine." But don't make the buyer pay for your shortcomings. If you don't offer credit card payment options, it is your responsibility to provide a safe and easy purchasing option for your buyers. We talk about those options later. Can you afford to give personal attention to every buyer? A sale through your Web site produces several times the profit of a bookstore sale. If a sale produces more profit, you can afford to give extras, like personal attention. Do the math for your book. Mine lists for $11.95 and I offer free postage. Subtracting that and the cost of production leaves $8 profit. If the book was sold through Ingram, they would require $6.57 of the profit, and expect me to accept damaged returns. This means I make more selling one book through my Web site than five through bookstores. (I'm assuming the savings in shipping multiple books to Ingram would be offset by damaged returns. That's probably optimistic. Many self-publishers lose money selling through bookstores.) If you're a self-published author, you need a Web site, but don't stop there. You need to draw people to it. That's what Autographed By Author does. Make sure to register with us after setting up your site. If an internet shopper is looking for autographed books, they will probably find our site. We are highly ranked in many search engines. See some examples here. We can't promise you will make sales to any of our visitors. We send interested shoppers to the category page your book is listed on. The more exciting your book's description, the more shoppers you'll snag. If your site gives them what they expect, you'll convert many of them into buyers.
Other hosts Here's a list of a couple hundred free hosts: http://www.freewebspace.net You may decide that the free sites don't meet your needs. But it's a good way to get your feet wet and decide what you require. Having a minor Web presence is much better than none. For listings of low-priced hosts, try http://budgetweb.com/budgetweb/index3.shtml or http://www.hostspot.com/ There are several sites which claim to list hosts in order of quality. Don't believe it. High placements on many of these lists are paid for. Choose your host on the basis of services, features and price … then try to verify how honest the claims are. A good way is to ask other people for feedback on the company. What if your host becomes unreliable? You can move to another one within a few days, often hours. Protect yourself by not paying too far ahead for hosting services. Moving is easier if you build your site with your own program. We'll talk about that soon. If you have your own domain name, visitors won't know you've changed hosts. We'll talk about those soon also.
How do I collect payment for my books? You need credit card information or a check, collected either before or after the buyer receives the book. We'll talk about the prepayment options soon, but you might want to consider selling your books without prepayment … like the book clubs.
To encourage impulse sales. A large percentage of potential buyers leave the payment process before completion. If you make the ordering process simpler, you'll have more buyers.
What if they don't pay? Do the math for your book. For mine, each extra sale compensates for about three deadbeats. Authors who sell without prepayment report extremely low rates of nonpayment. One author said she had to remind about 10% of her buyers though. Reminders are easier to generate now than in pre-e-mail days. If you have an accounting program like QuickBooks, you can tell it to remind you when an account is overdue. Then you can send the first "wake-up" e-mail to the buyer. None of the authors I interviewed who sold this way had merchant accounts. They all required payment by check. Their deadbeat losses were much less than their merchant fees would have been … but they were still annoyed at the deadbeats. Make sure to request an e-mail address and phone number with the mailing address. Send an order confirmation to the e-mail address before mailing the book to see if it bounces, or the recipient denies placing the order. Send the book with a return envelope and a bill. Your faith in humanity may be restored. The authors I interviewed said that individuals almost always paid promptly. Bookstores didn't. If a bookstore tries to order through your Web site, you might want to upgrade them to a STOP (Single Title Order Plan) order at a 20% discount. Prepaid of course. If you decide to sell without prepayment, or presently do, please contact me. I'd like to include your experiences in future revisions of this article.
What if I only want to accept prepaid sales? Any way you do it, you're going to lose customers. Guests can print out a payment page and mail or FAX it to you with a check or their credit card information. They can call your toll-free number and order by telephone. But most buyers expect to transfer to a secure site to enter their credit card information. The services mentioned below offer that. If you don't have merchant services, you can open an account with CCNow. CCNow accepts credit card information from buyers and keeps 9% for their service. ($10/month minimum) I haven't used CCNow, but I haven't heard any complaints about them either. Check them out at http://www.ccnow.com/overview.html Another program that sounds good, but I haven't used, is Propay. They allow you to bill a U.S. customer's Visa or MasterCard account. The charge to you is 35 cents per transaction and 3.5% of sales. (Plus $35/year) Check it out at: http://www.propay.com/ If you have merchant services or use Propay, you'll need a shopping cart. It provides a secure page for the buyer to leave their order, contact information, and credit card number. Many people, including me, have been happy with the free cart offered at Mal's E-commerce: http://www.ait2000.com You may be tempted to avoid the work of setting up a cart, or the expense of CCNow, by using a service like PayPal. I don't recommend it. PayPal used to require buyers to agree a long contract that relinquished the protections they normally had with credit card purchases. I don't know if they do that anymore, but there have always been lots of merchants upset with their payments and errors. http://www.paypalsucks.com/ is just one of 200,000 sites with warnings about PayPal at http://www.google.com/ For examples of different ordering methods and forms, visit my Web site's "pre-order" page: http://www.heirloomstories.com/preorder.htm
You're all set! If you didn't have a Web site when you started reading this page, you have the information you need to set up a site, accept orders, and have Autographed By Author send customers to it. And you can do it for just a few dollars a month. If you host with Freeservers, I recommend paying the $3.32 per month to have the ad removed.
Domain name? What's that? Do I need one? A domain name is a name you choose as the address of your Web site. It points to it, wherever it is published. Your own domain name gives you the option of changing hosts without having to change your address, advertising, or losing referrals from previous publicity. In addition to making your site look more business-like, your own domain name gives your e-mail status also. You can make e-mail boxes using the domain name as the part after the "@" sign. Most hosts can show you how to secure a domain name. The cost for the first two years is rarely more than $70. Several registrars offer domains for under $9 per year. Why pay more than $9 a year for registration? Because the registrar may not be able to stay in business. If they go broke, you could lose your domain name. Network Solutions, used to be thought of as the standard. Now, lots of people think of them like PayPal. http://www.google.com/ GoDaddy at $8.95 is one of the least expensive, but largest. I use them for most of my domains. A domain name isn't absolutely necessary, but it's an excellent marketing value. If you only use your site for sales through Autographed By Author, there's no need for a domain name. Just make sure to notify us if you move your site. Should you wait for a domain name before building a site? I wouldn't. You can always point the domain name to the site later. Get your site on-line ASAP.
Web Site Statistics? What are they and how can they help me? They tell you who's visiting your site, when, and from where. They'll let you track your Autographed By Author referrals if you wish.
Web Building Programs There are several programs that let you build a web on your computer. When it's ready, you can upload it to your host. If you feel your host isn't performing well, you can just as easily upload your site to another host and instruct your registrar to point your domain name to the new host. FrontPage, Microsoft's Web building program, is the most popular. While that doesn't mean it's the best, there are a lot of hosts that support it. You can even use it with servers that don't support FrontPage. You just can't use all the fancy tools. Should you get a program to build your site? I'd recommend one eventually, but get a simple site up today using the site builder of whatever host you pick. Every day without a site results in lost opportunities for publicity and sales.
Help Many hosts advertise their good on-line tutorials, FAQ lists, and tech support. Very often, the clients of these hosts feel differently. Lots of people build their own sites and are happy to help others at no charge. The host you choose may have an e-mail group or chat room where you can meet some helpful people. Every webmaster started knowing nothing about computers. They learned through a combination of reading, experimenting, and help from others. Many of them enjoy paying back. Every web-authoring program has at least one e-mail discussion group of people helping each other with problems. This site was built with FrontPage 2000. I learned with a combination of the help menu, a "Dummies" book, and an on-line e-mail discussion group. Most problems got answered quickly once I could put them into words. The worst problem was how to code the book category pages so they would automatically send the visitor to the book's feature page when the visitor clicked on the book's title. That slowed me down for almost a week. The e-mail discussion group was a life-saver for that. Should you pay a designer or consultant to get you going? It might be nice to consider as an option if you can't do it yourself.
Do it Give it a try. You'll be surprised how easy it is. You'll enjoy the self-sufficient feeling when you want to change your wording or add a page. And when it's operating, we look forward to welcoming you as the newest member of Autographed By Author.
If you build it, they will come … NOT! A Web site is like a store … in the middle of the desert … under a rock. How do you move your store downtown? A lot of publicity and search engine work. The work may not be practical for a one-book Web site, but it's a good value for Autographed By Author. Generating large traffic figures helps all the authors with titles listed at Autographed By Author … and only one of us has to turn into a search engine geek. So if you want to sell books from your Web site without becoming a geek like me, make sure to register your site with Autographed By Author. Now where did I put that slide rule?
BTW: As you get ready to build your site, you might want to start thinking like a marketing professional. This article may help
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