I seem to spend a lot of time browsing publisher websites and, with some exceptions, I’m always surprised at how little effort these sites put into attempting to engage me as a consumer. The Internet is a great tool for communicating with your customers, and for direct selling, and publishers just aren’t taking advantage of this. In this post, I’ll try to lay out some of the specific features that should, or could, go into a strong web presence. I’ll develop these ideas separately in future posts.
An attractive design
This should go without saying… but judging by a lot of sites out there, it doesn’t. Your website isn’t a front end for your database. It’s the public face of your business.
A clear front page
This should communicate at a glance what kind of books you publish, and how the reader can use the site to find out more. Remember your users weren’t at your design meetings, so they’re only going to find your content if you tell them it’s there, and show them how to find it.
A well optimized, content-rich page for every title
Every book in your list should have its own page, which is both optimised for search engine visibility and full of useful content for potential readers. Slapping up your Onix data isn’t going to cut it if you want to rank above authoritative reviews, Amazon, and Wikipedia pages for the title: you need to think about the unique content that you can provide, be it excerpts, videos, author interviews, reading group notes, free stories, etc. Imagine that Joe is going to send Jim one link to an information page about your book: what can you offer that will make him send a link to your page, rather than Amazon’s?
A well optimized, content-rich page for every author
Here again, a simple list of the titles you publish by this author isn’t enough. Think about your competition. If you want the chance to establish direct communication with readers about an author, you need to rank highly in Google searches for that author’s name. What kind of unique content can you offer that will beat the offerings on Amazon, Wikipedia, blogs, and other websites? Again, think about videos, think about interviews, extra downloadable content. And don’t abdicate the responsibility for this to your authors: if they don’t know or care about creating great web pages, they aren’t going to be able to do much for you. If they do, they should be busy developing their own sites.
Crystal-clear and versatile newsletter options.
Don’t make it all or nothing. No reader cares about everything a publisher produces, and if you try emailing them about everything you produce, or just about the key titles, whether or not they reflect the reader’s interest, they’re going to stop reading your newsletters. The more that a reader can tailor the communications they receive from you to their interests, the better those communications are likely to convert into site visits, awareness, and sales.
A user-friendly, transparent, direct purchasing system.
These days, customers have pretty high standards when it comes to website purchases. The slicker and more informative you can make the system, the better. Provide shipping information and pricing up-front.
Added value for direct purchases
New customers need a reason to buy from an unknown entity like a publisher website rather than through their usual channels. “Supporting the industry” as a reason might work 2% of the time, but it’s worth chasing the other 98% of potential sales as well. Think about how you can add value to direct purchases from the site. These could be across-the-board promotions (free x with every title) or specific promotions to tie in with specific titles. Some ideas for one or other category include free samplers, free random books (works better within a narrow genre), signed copies, postcards/stickers/posters, free audio downloads, ebooks, or chapbooks. It might help to think of promotions that will help not only sweeten the deal for this purchase, but lead to future purchases too.
A regularly updated blog with good content
A well managed blog can attract both regular visitors and links to your site, but the key here is content. Write about things that matter to your market (if you have a very broad market, think about splitting into different blogs for genres/imprints, or just focus on a key area). Let’s say you print science fiction. What do sci-fi readers want to read about? How about unique interviews and features about their favourite authors? Write up conventions, maybe offer (authoritative) reviews of new TV shows, or revisit neglected sci-fi classics. Talk about what’s going on with other science fiction sites, and make your blog an active part of the online community.
Blogs about a book publicist’s day are great… if you publish books aimed at book publicists, and a blog that talks incessantly about the inner workings of a publishing house might work if it’s engaging enough, and your titles are of a literary bent… or it may increase the size of your slush pile before it increases your sales.
Edit: see more about publisher and author websites in our Book Websites category.
April 28th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
Interesting stuff. Good publisher websites in my experience include Penguin (all-round good one with blog, free chapters, features etc, though their book info pages require work, esp the apparent ability to submit reader reviews, which has never worked for me), Bloomsbury (good author info and interactivity with proof giveaways etc) and Picador (excellent blog).
Bringing up the rear are Random House, who don’t even show forthcoming titles on their search results, and HarperCollins, which last time I looked, was promoting an 18-month-old book on its front page. Maybe these sites have improved since I last looked at them, but – and this is part of the point – they were so bad the last time I visited, I haven’t been back in months and months.
Canongate is an odd outlier. They try very hard to make their website disinctive, but I don’t think it works – there’s too LITTLE traditional publisher stuff. Also I ordered a book from them once, several years ago, and they sent me so much crap with it – free book, free chapter samplers, various other promotional material – that it put me off ever buying from them again.
April 28th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
Just had a look at the two I badmouthed. The Random House one is slightly improved, but still a messy front page and crap search results, no ability to order by publication date etc. Does now have many extracts available though.
The HarperCollins one is worse – you can have their corporate site http://www.harpercollins.co.uk which doesn’t seem to be aimed at the public at all (check out that drop-down menu at the top), and the one I was thinking of when I posted the above, http://www.harperperennial.co.uk – hard to believe that this is the nominal web presence of the literary paperback arm of one of the world’s biggest publishers. Their front page promotes books which came out three or more years ago, with cover images that don’t work, and most of the links don’t work either.
Maybe they’re running this site down, in which case try http://www.bookarmy.com which is the site they promote on the back of their new books. It’s supposed to provide recommendations of similar books if you enter one you like. I tried Dr Haggard’s Disease by Patrick McGrath, one of my favourite novels – all the suggestions were for medical textbooks. Then I tried I’ll Go to Bed at Noon, the superb Booker-shortlisted novel by Gerard Woodward. All the suggestions were books with ‘I’ in the title. Sheesh.
April 28th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
Hello, John! Thanks for your great comments.
I agree with you about Canongate—it’s frustrating to go there looking for information about one of their titles, only to be met with all that “Meet at the Gate” stuff. That said, I remember back in the days when the Rebel Inc imprint was still around, when the site had a bit of a “membership” bent but was still very focussed on giving clear information about their titles. They gave out free books then, too, but perhaps the fact that it was a single imprint, and more focused, made it more useful—I discovered Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl through one of their giveaways, and some other titles too. In fact, I’d say that the old Rebel Inc. site is probably the only publisher site that I’ve used with any regularity. Canongate/Meet at the Gate not so much. Or at all.
The problem with sites like BookArmy is that I suspect most users don’t want to join a community, they just want good, accurate information fast. If this is what Harper are plugging on the back of their books, they must have really given up on having their own Internet presence.
That said, I see that there are some imprints doing their own thing online – I’m going to be posting about those later this week (more than one post in a week, on The Fiction Desk? A likely story…)
I think this is going to become more of a regular subject here on TFD, because I’m concerned/amazed by how badly publishers are handling their websites. They just don’t seem to understand how to talk to their market online, or why it’s important to do so.
April 28th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
By the way, I’m interested that the free stuff put you off ordering from Canongate again… what was the problem? Did it feel too much like a hard sell, or a waste of resources, or…?
April 28th, 2009 at 10:39 pm
Well yes, but more just a pain in the arse to sort through it all, plus an element of trying too hard. Maybe others would welcome free books – I don’t, as I get more than I want anyway from publishers (twelve last week, only two of which I kept) – so some crime caper (I think it was) was just another to take up space in the charity shop pile until I got around to clearing it out.
It may also have been – I’m extrapolating here rather than remembering – that with all that stuff in the Jiffy bag, it didn’t fit through my letterbox and I had to go to the depot and collect it. And I hate that.
Anyway, I agree that publishers frequently struggle to communicate with their readers. The main problem is that most readers are not like me, and don’t give a fig for who the publisher of a book is, and don’t have any loyalty to one house over another. Publishers know this, so to some extent they probably wonder what the point is. And then give blogging duties to some office junior or underpaid admin assistant.
April 29th, 2009 at 11:00 am
I know what you mean about the going-to-the-depot business. I remember a few years back, our local post office depot stopped answering the phone. So when you called the number on the card to arrange redelivery, there was no reply, and no other option but a 45-minute trudge to the middle of nowhere. I called the head office and complained about their not answering:
“Yes, we’re aware of the problem.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
“We’re going to take the number off the card.”
…
You’re right about most readers not being like you / me, and I do wonder whether nowadays, I’d great a free book with less enthusiasm than I did back then. But I think publishers do need to think about promoting their brand in a way they haven’t before—and making sure that they show up in the search results for authors and book titles, because that’s how they’re going to introduce casual readers to their other stock. In the rush to modernise the product, I think they’re forgetting to modernise their communication.
April 29th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
[…] on from the post about publishers’ websites, I wanted to start looking at some specific sites and find out what they do well… and what […]
April 29th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Ah, so here’s why HarperCollins haven’t been updating the HarperPerennial website.
April 29th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
Good find, John!
May 4th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
Hello! It’s very interesting reading the various reactions to Meet At The Gate, which is an evolving project. I guess the thing is we decided _against_ developing a publisher’s website, which is why we wouldn’t stack up to normal measures of publisher website effectiveness. That is, you can find out about Canongate’s titles on Meet At The Gate, but its main function is to _be_ Meet At The Gate.
But Canongate’s online presence as a publisher will continue to change and grow, so Meet At The Gate is definitely not the be all and end all of Canongate’s online efforts.
May 4th, 2009 at 2:30 pm
Hi Andrea, and thanks for joining in the conversation!
I’ll certainly keep an eye on the site’s evolution —I do visit every few months, even if I never do much when I get there. I just wish there was a place where I could find out about what’s going on at Canongate, and browse your list, without having to dig through this other content! Have you considered spinning Meet at the Gate off as a separate project, and running a pared-down Canongate-centric site as well?
May 4th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
I don’t think I’m allowed to say! ;op It’s still early days and I think it’d be foolish to ever claim we’re ‘done’ with the website and it’s all finished.
Rest assured we do keep an eye on what people are saying about Canongate online and we continue to work on our online presence based on feedback like yours and John Self’s (as well as positive reviews, of course).
May 5th, 2009 at 11:24 am
Hi Andrea, well, I don’t want to pry. I’ll just sit quietly in my corner, and look forward to watching the site evolve!
May 7th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
Interesting to read your responses, Andrea. I agree with Rob that a ‘normal’ Canongate site running in tandem with Meet at the Gate would be ideal. On the one hand, Canongate is such a forward-looking publisher that I’m not surprised they’ve tried something different, and I do respect that, but I also want the traditional stuff too.
One thing I saw in the July-Jan catalogue was that there would soon be lists going up on Meet at the Gate – top tens from authors, celebs etc – which I am very interested to see but I don’t think they’ve appeared yet. Well, if I’m honest, the one that caught my eye on the sample screenshots in the catalogue was Maria Aitken. I really just want to see if she recommends any books by Patrick McGrath, her husband (and one of my faves)!
May 7th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
Is that ‘The Guest List’, John? I was wondering about that as well.
May 7th, 2009 at 7:19 pm
Yeah that’s it I think. I don’t have the catalogue to hand.