Web site review
When we publish a new author we go through a series of certain
marketing routines. One action is the offer of a web site or blog review. One
glaring era we see on many authors’ sites is a lack of call to action.
What is a call to action?
This is the means by which you make it easy for your readers
to act on what you’re telling them about, so it might be:
A link to your book on Amazon or similar
A link to where people can download a free sample of your
work
A link to an event you’re holding
How does this square with avoiding ‘buy my book, buy my book, buy my book’?
First of all, I personally have no objection at all to people
putting direct links on social media or their sites to their book on Amazon or somewhere
else where you can buy it. If it’s a book that sounds interesting I’ll buy it.
If it’s not the type of thing I’m into I’ll just not click through. I can still
appreciate that the author wants to let us know about their work. If I’m not
sure, I’ll click through anyway and read a bit more about it and perhaps look
at a few reviews.
But here’s the thing - if I’ve got to go and look it up myself,
well I can’t be bothered. Life is too
short.
I actually find many of the books I end up buying by reading
about them on Twitter or Facebook.
I post links to my own books and other books we’ve published
on social media too but keep strictly to
the 20/80 rule. Only 20% of what I post on social media should be direct calls
to action. In fact it’s probably only about 10% though I do ads for our books
that haven’t cleared their set-up costs and stories on CafeLit that haven’t had
at least twenty hits.
Bios on CafeLit
I’m always a little puzzled when authors on CafeLit don’t
provide a bio. Is it shyness? Do they expect me to dig out an old one?
Well they shouldn’t be shy. If you’re a writer, you’re
running a business. We don’t offer payment for stories that appear on the daily
postings though some will get into the Bet
of book and receive royalties. We do offer authors the right to shout out
about themselves and their achievements. Why shouldn’t they? People don’t have to
follow the links if they don’t want to but it can be frustrating if they would like
to know more and there’s nothing there.
No, I’m not going to dig an old one. I don’t have that sort
of time. Besides we all move on. Pretty well as soon as you’ve written a bio it’s
out of date. Bios anyway can be post specific. If you’ve written a story based
on potholing something about your experience of potholing might be interesting.
But not if you’ve written as story based on skiing. Our submissions guidelines
specify that writers should provide a bio and whilst we don’t preclude people from
being published by us if they haven’t followed the guidelines to the letter and
their submission is the best on the day but if we have two equally good ones
and one has all the components we’ll go for the more complete one.
Our magnet book
This is a major call to action. We’re giving away a splendid
selection of many of our authors in exchange for folk joining a mailing list – a
mailing list that is GDPR compliant and which they can opt out of at any time.
We’ll mail out to people on that list news of our new books and of offers on
our backlist.
And guess what: within the pages of the book are other calls
to action which take reader to more works by an author they’ve enjoyed.
If you’re in the book, or even if you’re just published by us,
because you will still benefit form that mailing list, do feel free to use the image
and the link to create a call to action on your own site. Or just copy the concept
to make your own call to action.
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