Establishing an internet presence.

[Tim Murray]

I am trying to get out of the invisible status on the internet. I am almost ready to release my first book. After a DOA (dead on arrival) crowd funding campaign, I realized that no one could find me on a general search. How do you cure this problem?

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Create content.
LOTS of it.
Appropriate content.

What do you expect people to search for? That's the question. Your name or a book you wrote are IRRELEVANT. Why? because no-one knows those.

So you need loads of content that people WOULD search for when they don't know who you or your book is. A decent entertaining blog updated weekly with relevant content is hugely better the content-free-advert-funded-people-exploiting walled gardens/echo chambers of social media such as Facebook & Twitter.

There is no easy instant answer. The Internet is huge. Why would anyone want to look for you?

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Don't sleep. Ever.

Anyhow, I've done okay at this since my first book came out about 6 months ago.

But, really, I started unwittingly five years ago, by getting here and talking lots. But here goes:

1. Communities - join them and join in. Don't try to sell your book, just get to know people. Eventually your book will come out.
2. Facebook - groups can be quite good. Join relevant ones and treat like the community above.
3. Twitter - more limited but joining in relevant chat hours under # can be quite good.
4. Reviews - more of a drip-drip this than an oh, my word that review got me 50 sales. Incremental drip feeding works better.
5. Circles of interaction - keep trying to increase them. Try not to just stay in the same circles, although you'll find you'll keep meeting the same people
6. Blogs are fine, if you like writing them. Not good if they're a chore.
7. Instead of asking the big sites for a review, offer them content. Write a guest post and they'll add your links etc, and they'll actually print it if it's good and fits their remit.
8. Say yes. Don't be picky. Interview? Sure! Need someone to support my facebook launch? Be there! Every bit of coverage is another drip and it's about people starting to know your name.

But, really, it's point one - get to know people - combined with time. It takes loads of time. Loads. There is no shortcut.

Lastly, internet isn't the be all and end all - word lf mouth can grow from local coverage as well.

Edit - a memorable name's handy, too.

 

[Brian G Turner]

I am trying to get out of the invisible status on the internet. I am almost ready to release my first book. After a DOA (dead on arrival) crowd funding campaign, I realized that no one could find me on a general search. How do you cure this problem?

You don't, because it's the wrong direction to approach the problem.

Oh, you could indeed set up a mega wonderful blog that might get a lot of attention. But you would have to be very articulate, very proficient, and hugely dedicated to its success to the point of devouring your writing energies on that - resulting in your creativity being misdirected.

Even worse is that your returns on doing so will be very small. Engaging people with discussions on popular topics means those people want those populer topics, not your fiction.

The best thing to do - if you are serious about self-publishing - is to set your sights on the long-game. That means you focus on writing and writing very well, and doing so as productively as possible - with as much publishing frequency as is reasonable.

Over time, doing this, if your writing is good enough, your target audience will pick you up. Lee Child said that his agent told him that it takes 10 years to become an overnight success. So aim for that.

Because a following before success will not easily translate into success. But success is more than likely to result in a following.

2c.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Oh, you could indeed set up a mega wonderful blog that might get a lot of attention. Put you would have to be very articulate, very proficient, and hugely dedicated to its success to the point of devouring your writing energies on that - resulting in your creativity being misdirected.

Even worse is that your returns on doing so will be very small.

So true.

It's why I'm writing novels and not maintaining all my web sites. I decided about 2 years ago to put energy into writing stories that I'd like to read rather than doing my web site updates (I still do update my very many sites a bit).

 

[JonLaidlow]

The internet is a huge place, with big companies and brands desperate to dominate searches. If people can't find you, ask yourself why they would be looking for you? What is it that you want them to be looking for when they find you? It doesn't have to be a tiny niche, you just need a clear idea of why people should look for you, rather than everything else distracting on the internet (he says, having just looked at trampolining elephants). Then start working on content that will fill that space.

Writing is a long game, so start working on that content now, and be prepared to keep going for years. Eventually you'll have a pedigree and a cumulative body of work that *may* help people find you, or be interested.

 

[tinkerdan]

Your website needs something of interest; not just to you, but to a large number of people. This is no different for the novel or short story or whatever other work you are doing. The best thing would be to finish the novel and get it out there. A website can take a lot of your time and still yield little response as far as advertisement because of many of the things mentioned by other posters here. It helps to have a website if you are advertising in other ways such as other websites and promotional giveaway programs and even magazines related to your genre, because people might be looking for it then; but if you are doing all of that you need to have a finished product also.

One exception is those who post weekly chapters of their work. There a are a suitable number of people looking for free stories to read online.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

If people can't find you, ask yourself why they would be looking for you? What is it that you want them to be looking for when they find you?

The killer, and why I seriously don't care about trying to create "a presence" per-se. It needs too much time and content.

 

[JonLaidlow]

The killer, and why I seriously don't care about trying to create "a presence" per-se. It needs too much time and content.

Well yes, it depends on your motivation for writing. If you write for pleasure and personal fulfilment it's hard work, but if it's seen as part of building an audience for your "product" (ugh, bad word)...

 

[Ray McCarthy]

but if it's seen as part of building an audience for your "product"

Then you'd have no time for the product.
Celebrities and murderers get Internet visibility, it's pretty impossible for an unknown author.

 

[JonLaidlow]

Not arguing with you, it's Tim that's trying to achieve it.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Then you'd have no time for the product.
Celebrities and murderers get Internet visibility, it's pretty impossible for an unknown author.

As @JonLaidlow says - it depends on your motivation. Anyone who thinks they'll get anywhere without some internet savvy is building a hard path in this current age - the internet drives word of mouth.

It confuses me - why anyone would put hours and hours into the product, shove it out, hope it sells and not put time into promoting it. Fair enough if you don't care if it sells, or if you don't want to make a living from writing. But IF a person does want to make a living from writing they need to accept that part of that living is promoting it. For some, that means hours at signing sessions and talking to schools, for some it's going to convention, for some it's writing blogs and web content and expanding an internet presence. Yes, it takes time from the product, but without doing it you're making it harder for the product to sell.

It's, actually, about finding a balance between producing and promoting (and juggling whatever else you have on)

On another note - why is product an ugly word? That's what we produce. A product, to sell. We may have differing expectations of how creative etc we want it to be - but a book is still a product. There's nothing wrong with that.

 

[JonLaidlow]

Well we try to see literature as more artistic than boxes of paperclips on shelves, so "product" is bad if your context is talking about the many other pleasures of writing and reading. But I mainly meant it was a bad choice of word for my post. I'm the last person to get stuck on high/low art distinctions...

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Well we try to see literature as more artistic than boxes of paperclips on shelves, so "product" is bad if your context is talking about the many other pleasures of writing and reading. But I mainly meant it was a bad choice of word
for my post. I'm the last person to get stuck on high/low art distinctions...

Heh. It's the management consultant in me. We have products and services and customers and that's pretty much it

 

[Ray McCarthy]

why anyone would put hours and hours into the product, shove it out, hope it sells and not put time into promoting it.

Internet is only a part of promotion as you point out.
Someone said half of what is spent on advertising is useless. The problem is that no-one knows which half.
At the start, your product (and let's not be shy, nothing wrong with the word) must be good and 90% of your effort in marketing might seem to have little value. "Self Publishing" is a euphemism for "Self Marketing" really?
The cover, even for an eBook must be really good.
The Blurb must be brilliant.
The Categories chosen must be accurate (or you'll get bad reviews).
Traditional media (papers, TV and for books maybe especially Radio) is still very important. Probably BBC Website and any of the various BBC R4 book programs is better than any amount of Facebook, Twitter and Blogging, unless it's one of the "big" news site style "blogs" such as io9 or the Salon etc.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

Traditional media (papers, TV and for books maybe especially Radio) is still very important. Probably BBC Website and any of the various BBC R4 book programs is better than any amount of Facebook, Twitter and Blogging, unless it's one of the "big" news site style "blogs" such as io9 or the Salon etc.

Watch this space ....

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Raiding Talk Talk for publicity is going a bit far ...

 

[Michael Coorlim]

1. Each book you write is another potential avenue for discovery. One book won't help unless you get super ridiculous lucky. Until you have five or six books out, the chance of someone just stumbling on you is infinitesimal.

2. A second means of discovery is maintaining a social media platform. Make yourself someone worth knowing. Do this the same way you make friends. Just be interesting, useful, helpful. Post interesting things, contribute to communities. Don't hawk your books. Be awesome and let people discover your books - links in your profiles, etc. This is totally optional, by the way; only bother if you enjoy tweeting or facebooking or whatever, and don't try to dominate every social media network. Just pick the one or two you like best.

3. Marketing efforts have a greater ROI the more books you have out there. So first: Focus on creating content. Produce your top shelf material as consistently as possible. Honestly, to succeed without getting super lucky, regardless of talent, you should aim for 3-4 novels a year minimum. That may or may not sound like a lot, but the more hours you put into writing the faster it'll go. And 4 novels a year is only something like 6 hours a week. Easy, especially if you're not sweating social media.

Edit: I don't mean to make success sound inevitable because it's really not. Just that you cannot control most of the variables involved in finding an audience. You can control your rate of production and social media presence and other marketing/promotional efforts, so focus on those, in about that order.

 

[tinkerdan]

@Michael Coorlim I might disagree with the six hours a week and 4 novels a year. Some people are just getting started and I'd think that you'd have to be prolific and fluent right out of the box and not everyone is both of those. Some might need 6 hours a day.

But I agree that unless you already have an internet presence then the only focus you should put on the web site is as a place for any reader interested in knowing more beyond the book they just read.

When releasing a new book, the first month is important. That's when you need to concentrate on every possible means of advertising; because, after that, your book gets buried by all the new releases that come out every day. But the advantage of continual publishing is that if you can sustain 4 books a year then you have 4 months where you advertise and promote a book that might get people to look for your whole library of offerings which is why you need a good author page and website when that happens.

 

[Michael Coorlim]

Oh, personally I aim for far more than 4 a year. I'd call that a bare minimum for someone with a full-time day job, family, other obligations; you can manage six hours a week, you can manage four books a year.