There’s a interesting, though flawed, marketing campaign going on for Philip Pullman’s latest book, The Good Man Jesus, The Scoundrel Christ. It takes full advantage of social networking and technology to promote the book, and is worth looking at a little more in detail for other novelists promoting their books online – with or without the help of an established publishing house.

How I stumbled upon the book was, like many others, through two great videos up on youtube, where Pullman talks about the book. The first video sees Pullman give an intelligent and strong response to a question posed during a public reading.  In turn this was tweeted and re-tweeted (look at the sharing stats at bit.ly alone http://bit.ly/info/c8wUyZ) .

This is a great lesson for authors – who often, reasonably enough are somewhat reticent about ‘promoting’ their work. In this case Pullman is saying something interesting, and his marketing team have taken full advantage of technology to let people know about it. It’s a far-cry from a simple ‘buy this book’ plea. It’s also something that you don’t need a publisher or marketing team to do, though you do need to put in effort and research.

The second video is a straight-forward promotional one, where Pullman talks about the enhanced version of the book (the book is being sold as an app for the i-phone, where you get an ebook, audiobook and video content all wrapped up together – a format that Canongate have already experimented with, ahead of the pack,  when publishing Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Monroe). This video is a straight promotional tool, but because it takes an interesting angle it’s more likely to be shared (and sharing is the name of the game if you’re going to put material up on youtube).

Now the technique of doing a simple but engaging video, putting it up on youtube, and getting people to share it is not beyond the means of a small self-publishing author either. The essential thing is to have something interesting to say, and to have already built up a reasonable following on the various social networks. Then you’re going to need to be inventive when tweeting, but hey – if you’re a writer that shouldn’t be so hard. So there’s a lot to learn from the Pullman campaign.

Where the campaign falls down though, is on the seo front. The video does have a screen at the end linking to the book’s dedicated site (http://www.thegoodmanjesusandthescoundrelchrist.co.uk), but do a search for ‘the good man jesus and the scoundrel christ’ and you’ll get press coverage and links to a wide variety of sites but not the official site (i’ve gone four pages in without finding it), which is a shame because the site is a very nice one indeed. One problem it has is that its front page is a fancy flash screen which does no favours whatsoever for search engine indexing on what should be the most important page on the site. Add to this the fact that if you go to Pullman’s official site you have to delve deep before you get a mention of the new book – go to the links page and there’s no link to the dedicated site etc.

Another questionable choice is the youtube route in this case. If you’re going to set up a dedicated site for a book, and you know you already have a following, why wouldn’t you set up a dedicated video player (with the option for people to embed on their own sites) with seo’d video, so that when your must-be-talked-about content starts ranking you pull people not into a youtube page (where you can’t buy the book directly), but directly to your own site where you can offer your visitors various calls to action (and monitor more accurately the traffic and stats).

None of which is to take away from the marketing of Pullman’s book – the people at Canongate are doing a great job, and the audience that Pullman already has means that these seo issues will probably have little impact on their overall sales. If you’re a self-publishing or unknown author though they could have a huge impact.

So, to sum up – take the lead from this campaign, in terms of creating interesting and shareable content to promote your work.  Use as many avenues as possible to distribute that content, but never lose site of the end-goal which, for you, will be to grab people’s attention and pull them into your site, where you have control and can benefit directly from your hard work.

There’s a good article in Mashable magazine entitled ‘Why Your Brand Needs to be on Facebook Now’, which goes back over the fact that Facebook hit a milestone recently when it became a more visited site than google in the US – that’s their main reasoning behind why your brand needs to be up there: facebook is hugely popular, and with its advertising possibilities it makes sense for you to be on it.

Do you need to be on Facebook? Only if you're going to do it right!

Well, yes and no. Certainly if you’re willing to take time out and design an effective profile that integrates cleverly with your existing online presence; if you’re willing to assign someone the task of maintaining the profile; if you’re going to take social networking in general seriously and devote time to it, then they’re right – your brand should be on facebook.

If, though, you’re going to set up a two-bit page with precious little information or interaction that can’t be found at your main web site, then expect to have a dead duck on your hands – and worse than that, a dead duck with a very prominent fan count that shows it to be a dead duck.

The recent case of Nestle on facebook, where Greenpeace activists managed to combine the open commenting settings of the facebook profile, with the word-of-mouth effect of twitter to effectively turn Nestle’s social network presence into a firm denunciation of the company’s policies, show the danger of taking a half-assed approach to social networking.

If you’re going to do it, then, to paraphrase George Michael (and its not often that I find myself doing that…) ‘do it right, right!’.

Food for thought:

Facebook Marketing

33 Million People in the Room

The Social Network Business Plan

Buy any of the above books from the book depository and you’ll get free delivery worldwide!

I recently participated on a discussion (on LinkedIn http://bit.ly/cgHG8R) about the advantages/disadvantages of having a video on your home page.

The discussion was an interesting one, bringing up various aspects including accessibility, brain-mapping, and general layout pros and cons, but one thing struck me forcefully – the ‘received wisdom’ that video has no seo benefits for your page at all. One commenter went so far as to say

[video]” is a bad idea. Distracting, absolutely a loser for SEO (The guy ** [referring to an early contributor to the discussion] has no clue).”

Now, aside from the arrogance of that answer, it’s also completely wrong. Adding video to your site can dramatically improve your ranking for some results, if done correctly.

The confusion around video seo comes from a simple and recognised fact – the search engines cannot automatically and independently determine a video’s content. Great strides are being made in voice recognition and image recognition (see this interesting interview Charlie Rose did with Marissa Mayer of Google), but for the moment the search engines when faced directly with a video draw a blank as to what it’s about.

So there are plenty of people out there that have translated that fact into a presumption, that adding video on your site is the same as adding nothing for the search engines.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, and yet again wrong. You just need to go to the search engine results themselves to see how misguided this is. Do a search for almost anything these days, and check the front page results and you’ll get mixed media results that include image thumbnails and video thumbnails. Videos are appearing on the front page results (and not just in google video search, nor just from youtube and other big video hosting sites like vimeo etc). Not only that, but there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence out there (including testing we’ve done ourselves with clients including iguidez) to suggest that it may be easier at the moment to rank highly for some keywords using video rather than a straight seo’d page.

And as with so many seo issues, the best place to start here is with the search engines themselves. Take a trip over to google’s webmaster centre and there’s plenty of information about how to set your videos up so that the search engines can make sense of them, and so add them to their index.

Key to this are general seo best practices –
1) Give your videos relevant filenames
2) Where possible caption your videos – this may/may not help with the seo side of things, but will improve your accessibility and benefits the end user, and we all know that benefitting the end user in many cases carries an seo advantage.
3) Submit a correctly formatted video sitemap – this allows you to give a better picture of the video to the search engines, including keyword tags, description etc.

These are just some of the ways to ensure that your video content is playing its part in your overall seo strategy.

There’s an interesting story brewing on Twitter at the moment, as best-selling author Alice Hoffman has taken to task reviewer Roberta Silman for her review of The Story Sisters, Hoffman’s new novel.

There are countless blogs and twitter profiles talking about Hoffman’s reaction – she tweeted up to 27 times about the review, going so far as to reprint Silman’s email address and phone number, for her readers to join in.

There are plenty who are labelling this as a great example of ‘how not to use twitter’, while Hoffman herself seems delighted to have this direct channel to discuss ’snarky reviewers’ with her readers.

Our view here at boduweb? It’s a great illustration of the power of twitter, and the old adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. It’s also an important lesson on how writers can get involved – for better or worse – in their own promotion.

Ony time and sales figures will tell whether Hoffman has the last laugh in this.

One thing that is essential, though, for any writer promoting themselves on twitter, is to understand the ramifications of using the system. If you post up there – even if you only have a handful of followers – your words may well be taken at face value on thousands of sites.  Remember, the system is disproportionately used by journalists and bloggers ever hungry for new stories to publish. It’s a double-edged sword.

If you’re using Twitter to promote yourself / your band / your novel / your conference etc it’s obvious that you would like to have a large amount of followers. There’s one single thing, more than any other, that puts us off following people on our various twitter accounts, and it’s a simple thing that can be fixed.

First of all, try to think how many people will come across your twitter profile. Theire are a couple of very common ways, and they all work on the same principle – a list.

1) You’ve started following me. Twitter is a great place for information sharing and conversations, so it makes sense in most cases for you to check out the profiles of those following you. If you like what you see, you’ll follow back.

2) I’m following, for example, @three_monkeys who writes about a very particular topic close to my heart. I think therefore that the people @three_monkeys is following are probably worth following, so I click on his ‘following list’

3) My profile is based on a specific area, one well represented by a profile like @bbcbreaking, so I browse to their ‘followers’ list looking for like-minded souls

In all three of these cases, I will browse a list which presents profile pictures and names together. Crucially, when I hover over a profile name I ‘ll get the bio info of that profile. And here’s the tip, then: Make sure you have a bio field filled out for your profile. If you don’t, you’re making it more difficult for people to quickly see what you’re about – and if it ain’t quick and easy, why should they bother with you??

twitter tip - add bio field

Right-leaning British newspaper The Daily Mail found itself with egg on its face on Friday as one of its infamously non-neutral polls was targeted by psychologists on twitter.

The poll which had the decidedly non-neutral question ’should the nhs let gipsies to jump the queue?’, raised the ire of a number of psychologists who as part of their research staunchly defend questionnaire neutrality.

An email and tweet campaign got under way encouraging people to vote yes on the poll, and so it was that right-wing rag saw 96% of the polled answering yes (with traffic that apparently almost crashed the newspaper’s server).

An interesting story in itself, but one with lessons for bands/writers/ businesses trying to promote themselves online. Hold on now! We’re not suggesting you start posting xenophobic poll questions in a tacky bid to increase your hits! No, but this combination of normal polling with email and twitter can be a great and powerful way to boost traffic.

An example: you’re a writer, so you put a poll on your site asking ‘who is the most important novelist of the last 5 years?’. You send out details of the poll to your email list – if you have one. You send it out to your facebook friends, and you post a link on twitter (making sure that the title of the tweet is short and snappy enough to encourage plenty of re-tweets).

We’ve already pointed out one horrendous experience had by a self-publishing author (who paid his publisher over ten-times the going rate to register his preferred domain name, and then found that they had actually registered it to themselves). Browsing about we’ve come across another mistake that authors/novelists using self-publishing companies can make.

They presume that, because their book is published to a high standard, their self-publishing company is the best place to go to when setting up a website for their book.

Any decent self-publishing company has various extra services available for their authors, ranging from business cards through to marketing, and inevitably web design. But are they taking advantage of their client’s inexperience to offer them an over-priced deal?

Let’s take a look at one of the bigger self-publishing site’s web design offer for their authors. They offer 3pages, graphic design, 2 rounds of revision, and html javascript for a whopping $600 . If you want .php or .asp you need to pay an extra $100.

That’s $600 or $700 dollars for a small static website, and one in which the design will probably feature your novel’s dust-jacket heavily, which is something you’ve already paid for elsewhere.

If you want to market your book using a website, you’re going to need a number of things that aren’t included above:

The ability to add content. Sites that regularly add/update material are – for obvious reasons – more attractive to both search engines and visitors. Having three pages online might work o.k if you’re already world famous, but if you’re a struggling author you’ll need to use your website as a tool to gain an audience, and three static pages is not going to do you any favours. You’ll get as much attention that way as you would leaving a single copy of your novel on the upper deck of the bus home – i.e not much.

The ability to integrate with social networks: The above package doesn’t stop you from setting up social networking accounts, but it doesn’t include them or integrate them with your eventual site. Trying to market your book online without using facebook, twitter, myspace etc is like entering the ring with your hands-tied.

Search Engine Optimisation: The description of the services on offer focusses heavily on the visual, but there’s no mention of working with you to ensure that your site is optimised for search engines. The deal offers you a pretty web-site, that will most likely end up hidden under a bushel as no-one will find it. Search Engine Optimisation should be an equally important part of any web design

And that’s all just for starters.

The Bodu Writers standard package offers the following:

• Customised installation of wordpress
  We’ll set up the super-easy-to-use free software WordPress, but customise it to your needs to make it more of a content management system rather than the simple blogging tool it’s usually used for. You’ll be able to add pages and blog posts whenever you like, and as your website grows so will the possibility of reaching out to a new audience for your book.
• Graphic Design
  As a self-published author you’ve already got the main design element paid for – the book cover. We’ll design a site template that shows off your cover to its full advantage. We do a number of sample site designs, getting feedback from the client on each one in order to work out what their tastes are. Based on that feedback we do the final design.
• Search Engine Optimisation
  We know that a happy client is one who can see his/her website performing well in the search engines, and one which is getting visited. With that in mind, we’ll ensure that the design follows the best practice guidelines issued by the major search engines. We’ll also explain to you what you need to do to improve your site’s visibility – remember, the code and structure of any site is important in s.e.o but a huge part of it is also the content created by the website owner (you).
• Social Networking Sites
  We’ll set you up on Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace, with profiles customised to compliment your main site. We’ll also give you our own tips and guidelines on how to use these social networks to good effect. [We can also set you up on other social networks of your choosing, though this is subject to additional cost to be negotiated.]
• Tech Support for a year
  We design your site for you to be able to manage it on your own, but we won’t leave you stranded. We realise it can take a bit of time, particularly if you’re not technically minded, to get up and running and feel comfortable with your site. We offer free tech support for one year as part of the package.

And the cost? Our websites for authors costs just €200

That’s a whole lot more for a whole lot less!

What about hosting/domain name etc?
These aren’t included in the price, for the simple reason that they are annual recurring costs. We can advise you on where to go, how to register a domain, or set up a hosting account – but the annual cost remains for you to pay. It’s worth pointing out that the self-publishing example provided above has the same conditions regarding hosting and domain registration – so the difference in price between our package and theirs remains the same.

How long does it take to get set up?
Typically we can get you up and running within a week – that includes time to do different draft designs, to consult with you to choose the design which suits you best, and to ensure the site is set up correctly. We’ll then help you over a week or two to get used to the site structure and ensure that you’re comfortable updating it.

Interested? Get in touch with us for a no-obligation discussion about how we can meet your website needs as an author

So the big news in recent weeks has been the presentation of Google Wave, due to be fully launched later in the year. You can check out the presentation here.

As with virtually any new search/social media release, there’s immediate talk of it being a *killer – with twitter being the * in this particular case. It’s also been suggested that this is Google’s shot at robbing some of facebook’s thunder.

Time will tell, but what’s particularly interesting to me is the fact that it’s going to be open source, and the possibilities for integrtation with your website or blog, allowing you to directly apply some principles of social networking to your own website.

Boduweb are already working on an idea for one of our clients – we’ll keep you posted here on the blog about developments. Exciting times ahead!

The trouble with being dedicated to your job is that you’re like a horse with blinders on – you don’t seem to enjoy the benefits that peripheral vision can bring. Yes, you are focused on your work and enjoy it so much that you have time for little else when you’re busy, but there is so much more that you are missing out on – like the fact that you could boost your popularity and explore new options with a presence on the Web.

If you’re a writer, you’re probably not too interested in anything besides the story you’re working on at the present. But there are reasons why you need to get yourself a website, that is, if you don’t already have one:

This post was contributed by Tiffany Davis, who writes about top online college courses. She welcomes your feedback at TiffanyMDavis82 at gmail.com

We’ve started work on a site for a self-publishing author recently, who already had a basic site setup at one of the more prominent free website networks for authors. He has his own domain name, and – frustrated at how poorly his site has worked thus far, in terms of search engines in particular – decided to take the plunge and set up a more robust and sophisticated site to promote his book.

First problem to encounter – transferring his domain name to a new server. He registered the domain name through this self-same prominent network, paying a whopping $99! Had he registered the name himself, using any accredited domain registration service he would have paid under $10 for the same thing.

But that’s not all. On closer inspection, the network have registered his domain using their company as the official registrant – making them, not him, the legal owners! It’s an old and dirty trick. It remains to be seen whether they’ll transfer the domain name back to him without a fee. In this case, if he kicks up enough fuss, there shouldn’t be a problem, but imagine that his book had already taken off and his name was getting well known. In that case the network would have every possibility of holding onto the name, and exploiting it for their own purpose. It’s a recipe for a marketing disaster and perhaps costly legal battle.

If you’re an author, and you’re setting up a website, get informed before you sign up for things like domain registration, or website design. Don’t think that because the company you’ve chosen to print and package your novel have done a good job in that field that it automatically makes them the people to trust with your online presence.

Our unfortunate author did, and he ended up

Paying over ten times the market value for his domain
And effectively handed over his online presence at the same time

So, how to avoid it? Ask questions. Shop around. There are plenty of sites that give free advice. We, at Bodu Web, for example are happy to explain technical issues like domain registration, free of charge and with no obligations.