Snowbooks

Now in their fifth year, UK-based Snowbooks describe themselves as a “feisty, award-winning independent book publisher”. Their list includes a range of general and genre fiction, along with sports, martial arts, and craft books. They’re a tech-savvy bunch, even providing these services to other publishers with their Snowangels project, so it should be interesting to see what they’ve done with their own online presence.

First impressions

The first thing that hits you about the Snowbooks design is how open it is: there’s plenty of white space here, and everything has room to breathe. At the moment, they’ve replaced their own title banner with a promotion for their new book, Family Cycling (see the image above), which is a little jarring. As an occasional visitor to the site, when I first saw it I did think for a moment that I’d come to the wrong place and almost clicked the back button. Maybe it would be an idea to blend special promotional headers like this in with something that immediately identifies Snowbooks to first-time or casual visitors—think of the way Google plays with their logo for special events and holidays, without ever replacing it altogether.

Above the banner is a good, clear vertical navigation system, offering exactly the options I want, and no more: from here, you can browse by author (or by genre from the sidebar), access trade or submissions information, or visit the blog. Perfect.

The main content area of the front page is taken up with a couple of browsable free short story widgets, which I think is a nice way to welcome casual visitors, and give them a better idea of what Snowbooks does.

One last quibble with the front page: they highlight titles in the right-hand sidebar, but clicking on a cover image takes us not to their information page, but straight to the relevant page on Amazon! It’s slightly odd to kick users off-site without warning like that, especially when from the front page they’re more likely to be looking for information—from you—than for a quick purchase.

Book / Product Pages

One of the many Snowbooks off-shoots is a project that finds new ways to quickly integrate ONIX data with technical applications, including websites, so we can expect to see some well thought-out product pages for the individual titles in their catalogue. To an extent, we do—the same clear, open design—but these pages, produced automatically from Snowbooks catalogue data, also feel a little limited. While the layout is attractive, it would be nice if the content of these pages was optimised for Web use.

For example, they’ve created a nice short story widget (currently on the front page) to help sell The Affinity Bridge—it would be nice if that was visible or usable within the page for that book. There are also a lot of big blocks of text here, caused by the fact that their raw data doesn’t include the tags necessary to break it into paragraphs online. Adding additional content to this data, and formatting it correctly for the Internet, would improve these pages a lot.

Another issue that arises from turning catalogue data directly into Webpages is duplicate content. In fact, The Affinity Bridge mentioned above is a pretty good example of this. I linked the hardback edition, but I could just as easily have linked the paperback or even the limited edition—while part of the text is slightly different on the latter, there are essentially three duplicate pages of content here. This is a common issue with publisher websites, and it throws up a couple of problems: first, the search engines are seeing duplicate content, and they certainly aren’t going to rank all three versions of the page—in extreme cases, they may not rank any. Secondly, people who link in to your site are going to link to different pages, and so you’ll have three weak pages rather than one strong one. (Right now, Google searches are turning up the hardback edition for “The Affinity Bridge”, but not the others. “The Affinity Bridge George Mann” shows nothing on page one.) I mentioned this in the PS Publishing review, but I think it’s worth repeating that, to really strengthen their websites, publishers should think about having one primary page for each title, listing the different editions, rather than identical or near-identical pages for each edition. This may not be so simple to create automatically, but it’s going to be much more effective with search engines and, I think, with users.

On a purely tech note, it would also be worth their while to get the author’s name into the title tags for these pages. Meta descriptions wouldn’t do any harm, either.

The rest of the site

Other than playing with the widgets on the front page, and browsing the title information, the other feature that the site offers its users is the Snowbooks blog—the Snowblog (which was a great name until Jon Snow started one too). This is updated regularly with odd bits of Snowbooks-related news as well as off-topic chatter. Maybe a little too off-topic at times: corporate blogging is tricky to get right, and their blog can feel a little unfocussed, at least for my own tastes. I’m not sure who it’s aimed at.

Conclusion

It’s obvious that Snowbooks have a nice eye for design and layout, and the site looks crisp and clean throughout. It’s also great that they’re exploring new ways to create pages directly from catalogue content (which is something that publishers do with hugely varying results)… however, really good Web content requires more than just templating existing data, and for the Snowbooks content to shine as brightly as their design, they could do with thinking about merging more web-specific content (some of which they already have elsewhere) into those product pages, taking a stab at addressing the duplicate content issue… and fixing that paragraphing bug!