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| Hearsay: |
Increasingly, publishers want authors to have a significant web presence, both on their own e-commerce sites, as well as Facebook, MySpace, etc. But for those lucky few with a serious promotional budget or precocious 12-year-old newphew, a really rockin’ website is the perfect ticket to fame, birds, and dough. I used to actually do web design, well before it became TV-design-for-the-web, and I’ve created a few static pages for author friends, but this level of design is really something that costs thousands of dollars, and is likely out of your price range, unless you’re a trophy partner for someone rich. In which case, I congratulate you and encourage you to adopt me.
The task of the book Web designer can be a tricky one. “Book sites present challenges that fashion and other sorts of sites do not,” Rabb said in a telephone interview. Because of the nature of the book medium in general, and the hope of selling movie rights in particular, “any time I get too specific about the appearance of a character, people start to get very nervous,” he added.
Instead, Rabb aims to represent a book’s “gestalt,” as he puts it. His sites often include original material from the author, as in the one he created for “The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet,” Reif Larsen’s much anticipated first novel about a young Montana prodigy obsessed with mapmaking. That site — which will be rolled out incrementally starting later this month until the book’s release in May — represents a failed “Smithsonian exhibition” of the title character’s work, with some 10 different “cabinets” documenting everything from a taxonomy of all the animals on earth to a map of the American West. It includes time-lapse videos of Montana landscapes, stop-motion animation of one of Spivet’s diagrams (which also appear in the margins of the book), the number for a “hobo hotline” where people can leave messages (which, of course, will later be placed on the site) and an audio collage based on the sounds of trains.
“When you’re writing a book, you’re certainly not sitting there thinking, ‘And wait till they see the Web site!’ ” Larsen said. “But it does offer a great opportunity to experiment with delivering character and narrative across different mediums.”
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January 26th, 2009 at 9:00 pm
I read the entire article…and I’m dubious. It sounds to me like a new enthusiasm. The publishing industry kept on doing book tours for years after they stopped being effective, and there’s no evidence that these jazzy websites are any more effective. There’s also no evidence that they aren’t. That’s the problem with the publishing industry and promotion. They don’t actually do any research the way other industries do. That’s okay if they want to take on the responsibility and not use up writers’ time. But it sounds like writers are expected to shell up $ and time for this without any evidence about how it works. The one statistic in the article was that 8% of readers had gone to authors’ (all authors!) websites in the period under review. That’s not a lot of readers. And nothing is known about how many of them then clicked to purchase, but I can guarantee it is a lot less than 8%. I remember from my old fundraising days years ago that in any given fundraising campaign about 5% to 10% of known donors would give. That’s known donors (like dedicated readers of a particular author). Prospective donors from a likely database only resulted in 1% response. If you translate that as an example, that would mean at best .8% of readers bought from any author’s website in that study. Before I’m going to shell out a lot of money (that I need for, say, my kids’ programs)on something that is the latest fad, I’d like something a lot more solid. That being said, I’m all for blogging. I have my own blog and I love it–not for giving advice on writing. But for actually writing about things I am interested in without having to think about marketing. I hope that in some way it brings in new readers of my books. But it’s also refreshing as a way of reminding myself of the simple act of writing and being read and the pleasure in that. I do have a website albeit without any whistles and bangs. But honestly I don’t like going to crowded, cluttered and noisy websites. That’s about as much as I can afford to do with my money and my time. I don’t think anybody really knows what creates a book that sells well, and I’m not sure even if I did know whether I could cough it up. I do the best I can and hope to make a living at it by being true to myself.