How to use this Page

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Abayomi, the Brazilian Puma

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 21, 2014.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

This month-long series of blog posts will explain author websites and offer tips and writing strategies for an effective author website. It alternates between a day of technical information and a day of writing content. By the end of the month, you should have a basic author website up and functioning. The Table of Contents lists the topics, but individual posts will not go live until the date listed. The Author Website Resource Page offers links to tools, services, software and more.

Help Your Fans Buy Your Books

We’ve been emphasizing all month the 2008 Codex study that explains why readers want to come back to an author’s website. One thing that is NOT on the list is links to buy your books. But you should definitely provide these.

Call to Action. When businesses advertise, they emphasize the importance of a Call to Action. This is when you ask your reader to DO something. Every page on your site should have a Call To Action (CTA). Buy my book. Download a sample chapter. Download coloring pages. Read this unpublished story. And so on.

Decide what you want a reader to DO when they come to a certain page. And then make the CTA a bold, bright and clickable button. Or use a larger font or interesting color. For interesting buttons, try DaButtonFactory.com or other similar free sites that let you customize the text, colors, style and size.

Affiliate Book Sales

Where would you like to send readers to buy your books? Some online bookstores offer a commission when you send readers to their site. The percentage varies from program to program and often the more referrals you send to a site, the higher the percentage. You’ll need to read the terms and conditions of each affiliate program to understand if it fits your needs. Here’s three affiliate to start with.

• Amazon affiliate: http://affiliate-program.amazon.com. The grand-daddy of affiliate programs, Amazon.com offers affiliate sales on books and everything else they offer for sale. Not available if you live in Arkansas, Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Missouri, or Rhode Island.
• The IndieBound program allows you to link to any Independent Bookstore and earn a commission on referrals. Indie bookstores use the Kobo ebook reader, and you can link to ebooks through the IndieBound program, too.
• Powell’s affiliate: Oregon’s huge independent bookstore also runs an affiliate program.

Other online bookstores offer affiliates and it makes sense to look around for one that maktches your book’s niche.

NOTE: If you use affiliate links, you’ll need to go back to your Privacy Page and indicate this.

If you are linking to affiliates to create a secondary income, also consider this:
Readers want to know Author’s Literary Tastes. Readers want lists of the author’s favorite writers and recommended books. Younger fans are also more interested in knowing about their favorite authors’ book, music, and movie recommendations. You could create recommended lists of books, music, movies and so on, and add affiliate links. Link to your own books, of course. But don’t be shy about listing your Top 10 Favorite Mysteries of the Year. Or anything else that reflects your literary tastes.

To make the process easy, Search for plugins that make it simple to add the affiliate codes to your site.

Plugins to Sell Your Books Yourself

When we talked about WordPress Plugins, I mentioned that there are times you may want to sell books from your site. Epubs and pdfs are easy enough because you only have to deliver a digital file. This article summarizes WordPress Plugins that make this simple. On the other hand, this Smashing Magazine article summarizes five shopping cart services that work well within your WordPress.

Of course, I have to add a CTA to this page, to practice what I preach! Even if you don’t want to buy, click below to see how the Gumroad shopping cart works. Did you also notice that I added a button to the Author Website Resources link above? It’s a button from DaButtonFactory.com

Buy Wisdom + Abayomi EPub Bundle

Buy Wisdom + Abayomi Kindle Bundle

NOTE: This bundle is available in two versions: Kindle and ePub for all other ebook readers. For information on reading on your Kindle read this tutorial.

How do you like the new countdown widget up there? Is your volume on? If not, turn it on and replay. Let me know what you think!

If it's not too much trouble, I'd love it if you could share the widget by tweeting, facebooking, myspacing, etc, or posting it on your blog.

Thank you!

Lisa

Released this weekend, the WorldCat keyword widget is pretty darn cool. You'll have to scroll down, though, to see it on our antiquated page layout (if you still read on the big screen, rather than your aggregator). Perhaps (sigh) it is time for some actual design skills to help us out here at IAG. I am feeling the need for some visual freshening. Or perhaps it's just spring fever.

Our original intent in keeping It's All Good in its current polkadotted fashion was to encourage everyone in libraries or library school who, like us, had limited design skills, attention spans and hours in the workday to devote to blogging to consider its merits and see how easy it was. "See," we said, "See how we're using it in the totally out-of-the-box, you don't need special tools way." But by now that ship has sailed...

But back to the WorldCat Keyword search widget. Designed especially for content pages or blogs that are relatively narrow in scope, you can build a refined keyword search right into the widget...and then of course you can also change it and get results right in the cute box. Play around with it and see what you think. Better yet, put it on a couple of blogs/pages and see what your users think.

…but better than never.

If you’re using a Mac, you might like the quick and simple Illustration Friday Dashboard Widget the folks over at Utopian.net Labs whipped up as a bit of fun for IF’ers.

The Illustration Friday widget will keep you posted on each week’s exhibition, showing the 30 most recent entries hot off the IFri presses, with links to each author’s own post of their image, and of course ways to click on to the main IFri site.

You can grab the Mac-only widget right here. (We’ll do versions for iGoogle and possibly for Vista, should demand arise.)

To install the Illustration Friday Mac Dashboard Widget:

1. Download the zipped widget file: ifridashbd.zip (252KB)
2. Double-click the ifridashbd.zip file saved on your computer (if you’re using Safari, step #2 may be done for you automatically)
3. Double-click the “Illustration Friday” dashboard widget icon that is expanded from the zip file to install it in your dashboard.

Sign the petition for more study about a national marine monument in the CNMI here:

Getting back to the basic technical skill of drawing feels so good. The way I like relax is to sketch and my favorite place to sketch people is at Starbucks, sipping a yummy hot latte, mmmmm. This was a quick 5 minute sketch to which I added some color as I loved the red sweatshirt she was wearing from Aeropostale. I love their t-shirts too, especially this Pink Shoulder Script Baby T. They're nice and long and go great with low riding jeans. What do you do to relax?