Maximizing a web site for book promotion potential

Stumped about how to maximize your web site to get as much book promotion mileage out of it as possible? Steve Bennett, founder of Authorbytes, offers some advice in his article, What’s on Your Website? That depends. . ., which appears on the Novelists Inc. blog.

As the title suggests, Bennett's theory is that one size does not fit all authors' web site needs. In some cases, sticking with a basic, "vanilla" web site makes the most sense. In other situations, it might be useful to add some multimedia components, Flash, and other extras to a book web site.

In any case, it's the basic site that counts, according to Bennett. If you create a solid site, then you can always add one helpful features such as a blog and a discussion board. But, if the core isn't right, then you can forget about adding to the site, because no one will visit more than once, anyway (and those who do visit once won't stick around long enough to buy your book).

One thing that Bennett's article emphasizes is that, while authors can create great web sites for their books, it's up to them to drive traffic to their site. That traffic, in turn, serves as a book promotion bonanza ... so the web site and a book promotion campaign go hand in hand.

A great article, and great tips. Check it out!

Are you using video for book promotion?

Are you using videos, such as multimedia book presenters, as part of your book promotion campaign? One of my favorite vendors for multimedia book presenters, by the way, is AuthorBytes, which designs sites for many of my clients and a whole host of bestselling authors, fiction and nonfiction, whose names you'll recognize.

Anyway, if you are using multimedia book presenters or video of any kind as part of your book promotion campaign, you'll want your book publicist to send the links to media contacts. In addition, you've already thought of using YouTube (along with your own Web site) to house your video. But you may be wondering: where else should I upload my video?

The answer, according to a WebProNews article, is that, once you've uploaded your site to YouTube, you can consider your task done. At least for now, YouTube has crushed the competition. Its videos show up ahead of every other site's videos in the search engines, so if you want to upload your video to the place that most people will go to by default, that place is YouTube.

At least until the next big video site comes along.